More Ideologues, Please
OpinionJournal.com’s Daniel Henninger has written an article titled “Sick of Sausage Today’s voters crave ideology”, which is well worth discussing. Let’s get started with it:
The most significant moment in Tuesday evening’s State of the Union speech did not occur while President Bush was speaking. It was just before the speech, when TV cameras caught the two new Supreme Court justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. They are conservatives. They are what the Republican voting base wanted on the court and what George Bush promised he would nominate if elected.
Liberals are appalled. Those who are not appalled are apoplectic, filling Web forums with denunciations of the justices and the president whose election victory entitled him to name them. This is a fight over ideology. Ideology isn’t popular in Washington. The American press abhors it, going so far as to make “ideologue” a term of political opprobrium, if not suggestive of mental illness. Ronald Reagan, an ideologue, was a “cowboy.” The press prefers “pragmatists,” politicians who win elections then set ideology aside to “get things done.”
Looks to me like the pragmatists are running out of covering shade. Ideology is back at the center of American politics. It is going to stay there through the 2008 presidential election. This is what happens when the reigning political class abandons ideology, as now. What preoccupies the Beltway’s conventional wisdom today and what interests voters could not be more different. What matters most to the Beltway is who gets caught by the Abramoff scandals, the legal dicta of al Qaeda surveillance, and who takes the fall for Hurricane Katrina. These things can be fun but alone they reduce politics to an Xbox game.
I suspect that the reason why ideology is regaining its popularity is because people are getting sick of hearing politicians sounding too nuanced. I also suspect that it’s a rebellion against inside-the-Beltway thinking. While Washington delights in realist foreign policy and consensus on domestic policy, people living here in ‘Flyover Country’ prefer plain-speaking, common sense people making the biggest decisions.
Is it any wonder that President Bush gets high marks for his idealistic foreign policies supporting the creation of Middle East democracies? Sure, his Iraq policies are being criticized but is anyone other than a handful of Clinton apologists saying anything negative about the overall theme of spreading democracy? Of course there isn’t.
People who crave the middle are simply going to be disappointed in 2008. The Democrats have abolished the middle, and the Republican middle has discredited itself. There is a reason John McCain markets himself as more right than center; he knows ideology matters just now. So do George Allen, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback and the rest.
How Hillary Clinton triangulates in the current atmosphere is the Rubik’s Cube of our time. But for the Web Democrats and GOP refugees from the Congress they thought they controlled, the puzzling is over. They’re looking for candidates “who represent my ideas.”
It’s telling that the most ideological woman in America (other that Boxer, Pelosi and Maxine Waters) is running fastest from her ideological views. It says that ultra-liberal policies can’t win. That’s Hillary’s grave. She can’t win without the Kossacks but it’s obvious that she’ll lose if she embraces their lunatic policies, too.
There’s a must read article in Townhall.com by Nathanael Blake that dovetails nicely with Mr. Henninger’s article. Here’s a glimpse of Blake’s article:
For every right-wing speaker brought to a campus, dozens or even hundreds of left-wing diatribes are delivered during lectures. Subjected to such an assault, outspoken conservative students quickly join forces and become hardened veterans of political warfare. In contrast, liberal students, who can go years without having their views challenged by a professor, become intellectually flabby; their dominance breeds complacency. When a school spends tens of thousands of dollars a year on a Queer Pride Center, how much is really left for student radicals to do?
But let us suppose that The Nation’s optimism is warranted, and that the push by new groups like Campus Progress manages to stir up liberal students. I still doubt it will produce the results they wish for. What conservative recrudescence there has been in higher education has not been driven merely by funding speakers and newspapers. Those have been important, but the focus has been on ideas.
The reality is that conservatism is thriving because we thrive on debating great ideas, starting with collegiate conservatives and moving all the way up the food chain. Because we’ve had to fight to be taken seriously, we’ve learned how to defend our ideas. As Mr. Blake points out, liberals haven’t had to fight for anything in ages and that’s led to an atrophying of their mental capabilities.
Another detail from the seminar: of the required reading, the most recently written was by Adam Smith. It’s counterintuitive, the sponsors paid out a great deal of money to bring 14 students and a few professors together to argue about things that have been debated for hundreds of years, and weren’t resolved in our discourses. Why not teach us how to hold a protest, or if we’re just going to talk, at least discuss something relevant to the current political situation?
It’s worth noting that the conservatives’ debate was about applying time-tested principles to new situations. No such debates happen on the left because they believe, at least among the professors, that our past is useless or harmful.
Is it any wonder that conservatives are winning?
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing