Greg Anrig: McCain's problem isn't his tactics, it's GOP ideas

Greg Anrig  —  8/11/2008 5:10 am

At long last, the conservative juggernaut is cracking up. From the Reagan era until late 2005 or so, conservatives crushed progressives like me in debates as reliably as the Harlem Globetrotters owned the Washington Generals. The right would eloquently praise the virtues of free markets. We would respond by stammering about the importance of regulation and a mixed economy.

Conservatives would get knowing laughs by mocking bureaucrats. We would drone on about how everyone can benefit from the expertise of able civil servants. They offered tax cuts. We talked amorphously about taxes as the price of a civilized society. After Sept. 11, 2001, they vowed to strike hard at terrorists without worrying about the thumb-twiddlers at the United Nations. We stood up for the thumb-twiddlers.

But now, seemingly all of a sudden, conservatives are the ones who are tongue-tied, as demonstrated by Sen. John McCain's limping, message-free presidential campaign. McCain's ongoing difficulties in exciting voters aren't just a tactical problem; his woes stem largely from his long-standing adherence to a set of ideas that simply haven't worked in practice. The belief system that enabled the right to dominate the war of ideas for the past 30 years has produced a relentless succession of governing failures, from Iraq to Katrina to the economy to the environment.

Largely as a consequence, the public's attitude toward government -- Ronald Reagan's bete noire -- has shifted. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that, by a 53-to-42 percent margin, Americans want government to "do more to solve problems"; a dozen years ago, respondents opposed government action by 2 to 1.

The single theme that most animated the modern conservative movement was the conviction that government was the problem and market forces the solution. It was a simple, elegant, politically attractive idea, and the right applied it to virtually every major domestic challenge. Whatever the issue, conservatives proposed substituting market forces for government.

So they advocated creating health savings accounts; privatizing Social Security; shifting government functions to private contractors; and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast."

But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made, and in many instances, the dogma has actually created new problems. Particularly after Hurricane Katrina, when Americans saw how hapless the Federal Emergency Management Agency was, the public has begun to realize that the right's hostility toward government has produced only ineffective government.

Meanwhile, large tax cuts (as under Reagan) have weakened the country's fiscal health without significantly improving the lot of the vast majority of citizens. And the right's enthusiasm for Bush's brand of "benevolent hegemony" in foreign policy, which insists on the U.S. right to wage preventive war and dismisses the U.N. as a band of meddlesome bureaucrats, has weakened our security -- most notably through the unnecessary calamity in Iraq -- by diluting our military capabilities and diverting their focus from genuine threats from al-Qaida.

So now what? In new books, two conservative stalwarts, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, don't even bother wrestling with such failures. Instead, they argue for an even stronger dose of the medicine that has, so far, produced mainly toxic reactions. They owe their fame to denigrating the government, so one can hardly blame them for sticking with the program.

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, a pair of conservative authors decades younger than Gingrich and Norquist, argue in their new, much-hyped book "Grand New Party" that the time has come to "move beyond the Reagan legacy and the mind-set of the current Republican power structure." They suggest plenty of proposals that many progressives would support, including a fairly ambitious and expensive national health care plan, subsidies for entry level jobs and more investment in infrastructure.

But while Douthat and Salam deserve credit for alerting fellow conservatives to the perils of staying the course, their embrace of a relatively activist government would shift political battles to a playing field on which progressives have a much stronger footing. Once conservatives concede that something like national health insurance is desirable, it becomes hard to discern what will remain of their Reaganite identity. On July 14, Rush Limbaugh himself fulminated about reformers such as Douthat and Salam.

It's bad enough that opening up the conservative agenda to energetic government would lose Limbaugh. Worse, it would alienate the wealthy business executives and scions who have financed the formidable network of right-wing institutions that includes think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, activist groups such as Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and a plethora of conservative media outlets. That money flowed because its sources benefited directly and enormously from such policies as tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Those sugar daddies are unlikely to find much to be enthusiastic about in a Grand New Party, and their money will largely determine whether and how conservatism will transform itself.

Traditionally, conservatives have defined themselves as resistant to change. But right now, conservatives -- including McCain -- are damned if they do change and damned if they don't.

Greg Anrig, vice president of programs at the Century Foundation, is the author of "The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing." This column first appeared in the Washington Post.

Greg Anrig  —  8/11/2008 5:10 am