I have long thought that the Republicans in power do not act like true conservatives.
“Conservatives,” posits Wick Allison, owner and editor-in-chief of Dallas’ D Magazine and former publisher of National Review, “are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.” By this measure, a rational review of the current administration’s programs against actual results would surely demand ripping the conservative stripes off their sleeves.
In D Magazine this week, Allison, a protégé of the late, legendary conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. (one of the “eastern elite”!), endorses Barack Obama in his “Leading Off” essay entitled “A Conservative for Obama”:
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.
Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.
Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts-a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war-led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
— — — Update 9/23 — — —
Will Allison’s support of Obama change anyone’s vote?
Ultra-left progressives and radicals, already suspicious of Obama’s too-centrist views, will find Allison’s analysis of Obama’s politics frighteningly discomforting, but I don’t see anywhere else for them to go. And on the other side of the political spectrum, I cannot imagine that many conservatives, “true” or “neo,” will read this essay and vote for Obama, so Allison’s intellectually honest essay may be just a refreshing footnote in this divide-the-country election.
4 Comments
Interesting.
And have you read Obama’s book, Steve? Dreams From My Father, anyway — I suspect, though I don’t know, that the other one’s more a standard politician’s book. But Dreams From My Father has some surprising insight and subtlety — passages about the men on both sides of his family, their travails, their pretensions, their failures and successes — that really touched me.
Pam–
The Obama book is on my bedside table, as yet unread. I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s excellent and upsetting Shock Doctrine…and am in a constant state of anger therefrom.
You wrote: “Ultra-left progressives and radicals, already suspicious of Obama’s too-centrist views, will find Allison’s analysis of Obama’s politics frighteningly discomforting. I cannot imagine that many conservatives, “true” or “neo,” will read this essay and vote for Obama, so Allison’s intellectually honesty essay may be just a refreshing footnote in this divide-the-country election.”
I disagree with the conclusion above. The ultra-left progressives and radicals may find Obama frightening and view Allison’s analysis discomforting, but the facts are that the only other choices they have in this election are McCain (and he’s not a choice), Nader (only in those states in which he is on the ballot), Bob Barr (and he’s not a choice) and a few others whose vote accumulation will be miniscule. Bill Clinton was viewed by that section of the Democratic Party just as harshly as Obama may now be viewed by them. But they did help to elect him over Bush the elder, Perot and then Dole. And, the Supremes, not the ultra-left, are responsible for Gore’s defeat. Let’s not even talk about what defeated Kerry.
It seems to me that Allison’s purpose in writing his essay is to do precisely the opposite of what you feel is worthy of only a footnote to this election. Many conservatives kiss the ground that Buckley walked on. Allison is one of them. I suspect that Buckley, like Allison, would have looked at who McCain has become and found a similar rationale to vote for Obama. I also believe (and I have spoken with several colleagues who are “thinking” conservatives) that a good number of conservative Republicans feel bereft of a candidate for whom they can support and will at best cross-over to Obama, or at worst stay home on election day.
By the way, had McCain been the candidate that he was during his run in 2000, and had not kissed the rings of the evangelical nuts and the neo-cons and ultr-right wing of the Republican party, and had he not morphed into the — I’ll do and say anything to get your vote– politician that he has become, I might have considered voting for him….
Naa, I take it back.
Philipico–
Your comment, and George Will’s column (see my next post) have convinced me.
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[...] Yesterday, I wrote about one prominent conservative’s support for Barack Obama. My conclusion was, “I cannot imagine that many conservatives, ‘true’ or ‘neo,’ will read [about that support] and vote for Obama.” [...]