Ramblings

 

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Conservatives Are Increasingly Uneasy About Current Trends in Washington

As the presidential campaign proceeds, the positions of the two major political parties are somewhat unclear. That Democrats favor abortion rights and gay marriage and Republicans do not is beyond question. When it comes to the war in Iraq the Republican Party, with some dissenters, supports it and the Democrats, although most party members oppose the war, seem to have adopted a position of neutrality at their Boston convention. How, after all, can Democrats make the war their central issue when their presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, voted for it?

When it comes to the question of the size of government and mounting deficits, the parties seem to be taking positions contrary to their own traditions.

In July, the White House forecast that the U.S. budget deficit for this year will be the highest-ever, $445 billion, nearly 20 percent larger than last year’s record shortfall. President Bush’s budget director, while calling the figure “unwelcome,” said the new forecast for fiscal 2004 -- in line with recent congressional forecasts -- provides evidence that the economy is growing and tax receipts are recovering. The message echoed in a new refrain in Bush campaign speeches is, “We’re turning the corner, and we’re not turning back.”

Many conservatives are dismayed with a Republican administration which has presided over such huge deficits and which argues that deficits are not really that important after all. More than this, however, conservatives appear to be sharply divided philosophically about the best course for the future.

In their book, The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge argue that for every libertarian the Republican Party harbors a moralist who wants government to monitor your private life; for every anti-tax crusader there is a neo-conservative who believes that government should strive to instill such virtues as patriotism, educational discipline and marital fidelity. Then there are the foreign policy hawks, who want more military spending, or crony capitalists who want government to hand out favors -- corporate welfare -- to their business friends.

Commentator Sebastian Mallaby notes that all of these pressures placed upon

. . . the small-government wing of the Republican Party explain why, even in the Reagan years, federal spending rose by a quarter in real terms. But since then a change has come over the Republican Party. Because it has gained control of Congress, its cronyism has blossomed; far from disdaining the lobbyists who seek to expand pork-barrel spending, the congressional Republican leadership has created its . . . “K Street Project” to ensure that lobbyists hire plenty of Republicans. The Republicans, in turn, hire plenty of lobbyists. The head of the Republican National Committee is Ed Gillepsie, who’s made a fortune peddling influence. His predecessor is Marc Racicot, who proposed initially to work as a lobbyist even while holding the top party job.

The conservative movement which emerged in the 1950s was defined by three major commitments: to fight Communism, to support traditional moral values, and to diminish the role of the federal government. It believed in free enterprise, low taxes, and balanced budgets. Its basic perception was that for freedom to endure in the long run, government power had to be circumscribed and limited, exactly the formula the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution.

In May, at the Philadelphia Society, an organization of conservative intellectuals, Sarah Bramwell, a recent Yale graduate and writer, was asked to address the views of younger conservatives. She said

 Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things, defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism. The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?

Ms. Bramwell expressed the dismay of many conservatives with the current notion of a U.S. foreign policy committed to spreading democracy throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East:

Many conservatives, especially since September 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy. I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.

Another young activist, Daniel McCarthy, an assistant editor of The American Conservative, the magazine started by Pat Buchanan, expresses this view:

I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement, back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals, who didn’t necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world.

Many hard-line foreign policy analysts are not certain that the war in Iraq was entered into with the proper strategic analysis and planning. We now know how faulty U.S. intelligence was with regard to weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s alleged ties with al Qaeda. We also know how a number of neo-conservatives within and outside of the Bush administration were pushing for war with Iraq as part of a larger ideological commitment to democratize the entire Middle East. Retired General Anthony Zinni, a past chief of the U.S. Central Command and President Bush’s former Middle East special envoy, argues that the administration was reckless in permitting itself to be influenced by those who advanced the notion of pursuing a policy of democratizing the Middle East, an enterprise, in his view, that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism.

A senior official of the CIA wrote a best-selling book, Imperial Hubris. Writing anonymously, this official previously ran the agency’s unit that concentrated on Osama bin Laden. It is his belief that the war in Iraq has been a major distraction from the effort to fight al Qaeda and that the war has inflamed Islamic resentment against the U.S. while aiding al Qaeda’s recruitment among Muslims.

Stephen Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan and author, with Jonathan Clarke, of the book America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, says of the war in Iraq:

This war is not going well. It’s costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our allies and friends. This is not the cake walk the neo-conservatives predicted. We were not greeted with flowers in the streets. I don’t think there’s any question that there is growing restiveness in the Republican base about this war.

Mr. Halper, who served in the Defense and State Departments under three presidents -- Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush -- and Jonathan Clarke, a former British diplomat, write in their book that,

. . . when we rallied to Ronald Reagan’s clarion cry of the “Evil Empire,” we never anticipated the day when Americans, as a result of their interventions around the world, would be held in lower esteem than if they had simply stayed home. . . . The neo-conservatives have taken American international relations on an unfortunate detour, veering away from the balanced, consensus-building, and resource-husbanding approach that has characterized traditional Republican internationalism . . . and acted more as a special interest focused on its particular agenda. We reach this conclusion reluctantly inasmuch as it implies that the American global role, to which we attach great value as a force for good, has not been as effective as it should have been.

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Reagan, says of Halper and Clarke that they

. . . are critics -- conservative critics. There is no nonsense here about going to war for oil or being bought by Halliburton. Rather, they worry about the damage done to the American republic by a vast social engineering project gone bad. One of the most serious costs has been to undercut the war on terrorism by shifting troops and resources to Iraq and degrading international cooperation. . . . They write that the neo-conservative disrespect for international opinion is particularly pernicious. It risks turning garden-variety anti-Americanism into something more insidious, specifically an activist phenomenon that we call “counter-Americanism.” This is especially dangerous at a time when America’s greatest security threat is a transnational matrix of terrorist groups that cannot be destroyed by the United States alone.

Other conservatives are concerned that, in the name of the war on terrorism, civil rights and liberties have been eroded and government power has been permitted to grow. Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, and David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, write:

After September 11, 2001, the Justice Department began asking for more and more “tools” to help law enforcement agencies identify potential terrorist threats and, as administration spokesmen like to say, “protect the American homeland.” No conservative can disagree with the goal, and virtually all understand the need to provide effective tools to those responsible for rooting out terrorists and blocking their plots within our borders. But many are beginning to ask if there has been enough thought about the impact on privacy and constitutional rights of all the “tools” acquired since September 11 and the new ones sought today. Increasingly, conservatives outside of Washington express real concern about giving federal law enforcement more power in the name of national security. They fear the “tools” the government seeks to protect us from our enemies eventually could circumvent our own liberties.

One aspect of H.R. 3179 -- the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act which would expand Patriot Act powers -- of particular concern to Weyrich and Keene are the new powers for searches ordered by National Security Letters:

These can be used to demand access to individual or business records even absent showing of individual suspicion. There is no way either the target of the investigation or those on whom the letters are served can challenge them as too broad. The statute, in fact, makes it a crime for a recipient to raise alarms in the press, or even to the Justice Department’s inspector general or the relevant congressional committees that should exercise oversight.

Another H.R. 3179 provision restricts a judge’s power to decide if admission of classified information in criminal cases is warranted. The government would ask such evidence to be allowed without opposing counsel present. The request would need to be in writing. Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia), a member of the Judiciary Committee when in Congress and a former U.S. Attorney and CIA official, told the House hearing this provision “represents an incremental shift of power towards the prosecutor.”

Weyrich and Keene declare that,

Conservatives should be concerned about all this. It is disturbing enough that key congressional leaders are maneuvering to enhance Executive Branch power without adequate debate on appropriate oversight and accountability. It was James Madison in Federalist 58 who said we did not fight for an “elective despotism” but one in which powers were divided between the different branches of government so “no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectively checked and restrained by the others.” However, by Congress granting great power -- without checks and balances -- to the Executive Branch, it abdicates its own responsibility and encourages future abuses by federal law enforcement agencies. Conservatives well know a government bureaucracy’s appetite for power is never sated. Left unchecked, it will push the limits, mindless of the cost to our own freedom.

Conservatives are increasingly confused and dismayed about what their future course should be. Narrow partisan politics, the Republican versus Democrat campaign, seems often to be a competition over who should wield power rather than how power should be used and how its scope should be determined. Traditional conservative goals -- a strong America, a smaller government, free enterprise and balanced budgets, an adherence to moral values -- are as valid and important today as they ever were. How to achieve them -- if achieving them is indeed possible -- is a much more difficult question than many once thought it was.     *

“I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.” --George Washington