Monday, January 19, 2004
(12:46 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Note to Our Conservative Brethren
You've won. You guys are acting like you're the embattled minority here, but you've won. Since Reagan, the Republican Party has had basically nothing but one success after another. Clinton's election was an exception, but you guys managed to keep him pretty well under control -- no universal health care, for example. Now you control the House of Representatives, probably forever; you are probably going to control the Senate most of the time; you only have to wait for a liberal justice to retire so that you can have the swing vote in the Supreme Court; and even if a Democrat manages to get elected president in 2004 or some other date in the near future, you guys will have him so completely hamstrung from day one that he'll barely be able to govern.
Liberals are no longer calling the shots. Liberals are no longer coming up with the grand sweeping visions for our nation. For better or worse, you guys are. Since you conservatives are so big on giving liberals tips on how to "stay relevant" or how to gain power, I have a tip for you: grow up. You're not the embattled outsiders anymore. You do not have to fight tooth and nail for every policy you want to implement. You hold the levers of power, and taking continual pot-shots at the Democrats or the irrelevant leftist academy is a childish waste of time. The existence of other opinions is not a personal insult.
Most criticism that the Bush administration has gotten is not so much about the overall vision -- we've accepted the reality that the future will bring fewer government services and lower taxes for the rich and more continual war -- as about the recklessness. Sometimes people who criticize you are actually trying to help you do your job better. For instance, all those nay-sayers who thought we needed more time and planning to make sure we got the post-war stuff done right in Iraq were not necessarily trying to keep you from having your war or distract you from your moral clarity. They had a stake in making sure that if you fought this war, you did it right. As it turns out, they were absolutely correct, and not taking their advice was foolish (see James Fallow, "Blind into Baghdad," Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004 -- not available online).
I understand that you conservatives got into power by picking a clearly-defined party line and sticking to it despite all opposition -- that was a very successful strategy for fighting the war, but now that war is over and you have to govern. I don't think it's any accident that domestic policy has been as incoherent a mess as the post-war cleanup of Iraq. When you were fighting you war against liberalism, you didn't really give much thought to what you'd do when you finally won, or else you figured that your tired cliches would do the work for you. The field of public discourse in America can be fairly easily manipulated in order to serve your quest for greater political power, but the world does not revolve around you. Endlessly repeating the same dogmatic phrase might make people believe it and make them vote for you, but it does not change the underlying reality. (Reality is neither liberal or conservative, though your dualistic theory of thinking that non-conservative = liberal might lead you to suspect that the world, like the media, is relentless in its liberal bias.)
For the foreseeable future, you conservatives are going to be the people governing our country. You had better take at least a little time to become better acquainted with reality. If you don't, we will all be stuck with a big mess that's not easily repaired, and we might wonder why everyone was so fired up to fight that war in the first place.
