Can Conservatism Be Saved?
by Ryan Sager  

In February of 2005, less than a month after George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States, more than 4,000 conservative activists from all over the country gathered in Washington, D.C., for the 32nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference -- or CPAC, for short. While most Americans have never heard of CPAC (it's pronounced like C-SPAN and features a similar number of congressmen), its organizers have called it "the conservative movement's yearly family reunion." That's a pretty accurate description. And with the Republican Party having just held onto the presidency by a convincing margin and increased its majorities in the House and Senate, this was one big, influential, happy family.

In fact, maybe it was a little too happy.

As the devotees of the party of small government and anti-Washington fervor pitched their tent for three days inside the palatial Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center -- a billion-dollar federal boondoggle in downtown D.C. that the Republican Congress named after the Gipper in 1995, in an act of unintentional irony -- a question hung in the air: What on earth are we doing here?

Not just in the giant government building, of course -- though these were the swankest digs the conference had ever had. But what was the party of Ronald Reagan ("Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem") and Barry Goldwater ("I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow") doing dominating Washington in the first place? What does a movement do when it's spent decades arguing that the government should have less power, and then it takes control of the government? Does it stick to its principles and methodically find ways to tax less, spend less and interfere less in the lives of Americans? Or does it slowly, but surely -- day by day, issue by issue, bill by bill -- succumb to the temptations of power and start to wield it toward new ends?

If the conservative movement is a family, it's a far-flung, rowdy, dysfunctional one. But the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) brings it all together.

If only for three days.

But for those three days, all the brothers and sisters, crazy aunts and sleazy uncles, barely-tolerated in-laws and disgruntled step-children, black sheep and golden boys and grandmas and grandpas of "the movement" (as those in the family are known to call it) are under one roof. It's a bit like the holidays -- inasmuch as there's a reason the suicide rate spikes around the holidays.

Various bizarre scenes unfold all around. An iMac plays footage of Ronald Reagan on a loop. Republican committeemen from the Midwest can be overheard debunking the theory of evolution while waiting in line for dinner ("What do you call an animal with a half-fin-half-wing? Kibble."). Al Franken and G. Gordon Liddy face off over at Radio Row. And books full of Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinions are given out as party favors.

Meanwhile, a walk around CPAC's convention floor takes one on something of a whirlwind tour of the Right. There, the 90-plus organizations and corporations that sponsor the conference set up booths to push their pet causes: Americans for Tax Reform ("reforming" taxes to within an inch of their lives), Americans for Immigration Control (keeping Mexicans in Mexico), the Family Research Council (keeping gays out of marriage), the Log Cabin Republicans (wedding gays to the GOP), the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute (grooming the next generation of Ann Coulters), the National Rifle Association (defending the right to shoot), the Drug Policy Alliance (defending the right to shoot up), the Objectivist Center (deifying Ayn Rand) and the National Right to Work Foundation (demonizing the unions). Just to name a few.

As in most large families, however, there is one marriage that undergirds the entire enterprise: For the conservative family, that is the marriage between social conservatism and small-government conservatism. There is no one group at CPAC -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- that fully represents either of these philosophies. Rather, these are the two main currents of thought that push the conservative movement along. Social conservatives (a.k.a. traditionalists, the Christian Right, the Religious Right) place the highest value on tradition and morality -- or "Western values," as they often put it. Small-government conservatives (a.k.a. libertarians) value human freedom and choice above all else.

These two kinds of conservatives, whose fundamental views of the world are at odds as often as not, were brought together in the 1950s and '60s by a concept known as "fusionism," the brainchild of conservative thinker Frank Meyer, an editor at National Review from its earliest days and a tireless movement activist until his death in 1972. In Meyer's formulation, social conservatives and libertarians should be natural political allies. Not only are their goals compatible, he argued, but their philosophies are complementary -- if not codependent. Either philosophy, if not reined in by the other, risks veering wildly off the tracks.

At CPAC, watching anti-immigration activists frothing at the mouth and calling illegal immigrants "burglars" and "wage thieves," and watching libertarians selling t-shirts urging "Capitalists of the world unite," it's not hard to see how that might happen.

Meyer began expounding his theory in a series of essays in National Review in 1956. It boiled down to a simple formulation: No act is truly moral unless it is freely chosen. While Meyer agreed with social conservatives about the importance of moral order, he feared that they were so wrapped up in preserving Western tradition that they were willing to resort to authoritarianism to achieve their goals. At the same time, while Meyer was in sympathy with libertarians and their emphasis on the need for a limited state, he feared that their philosophy was prone to degenerate into the pursuit of freedom for its own sake, free of any moral boundaries.

As Meyer wrote: "Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it ... Free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon surrenders to tyranny."

What's more, Meyer argued, social conservatives had a vested interest in the small government pursued by libertarians. It was the government, particularly the federal government, that was to blame for what many perceived at the time to be America's moral decay. As conservative writer David Frum summed up Meyer's thinking: It was federal judges who were banning prayer in schools; it was city planners destroying inner cities with their highways and public-housing projects; it was New Deal welfare programs that fostered illegitimacy. The way to achieve social conservatives' goals, Meyer argued, was to beat back big government. In other words, in a conservative society, libertarian means would achieve traditionalist ends.

It was a clever argument, especially in light of the threat from "Godless" international Communism, which was equally despised by libertarians and social conservatives. And to the extent that the conservative movement has congealed and succeeded in the decades since Meyer began pushing it, that success -- first within the Republican Party and then on the national stage -- has been due to the libertarian and social-conservative factions sticking together.

These partners got the Republican Party to nominate Barry Goldwater, a libertarian-conservative and militantly anti-Communist U.S. Senator from Arizona, for president in 1964. While Goldwater lost that race in a spectacular fashion, getting less than 40 percent of the popular vote, his candidacy committed the Republican Party to the cause of conservatism.

Out of Goldwater's failed campaign rose many of the pillars of the modern conservative movement. An out-of-work actor and former Democrat named Ronald Reagan launched his political career at the 1964 Republican national convention with a rousing, nationally televised speech, "A Time for Choosing," in support of Goldwater. Anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, best known today for her fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, first became known for writing a pro-Goldwater book, A Choice, Not an Echo, attacking the liberal Republican establishment that had elected Dwight Eisenhower and nominated Richard Nixon for turning the party into a weak imitation of the Democrats. And, last but not least, the idea for the American Conservative Union -- which founded and runs CPAC and serves as something of an umbrella organization for the conservative movement -- was born in a meeting just five days after Goldwater's defeat, with the idea of carrying on the fight begun in the 1964 campaign.

From these humble beginnings, the conservative movement went on to elect Reagan as president in 1980 and 1984. It turned over control of both houses of Congress to the Republican Party in 1994. It elected Bush in 2000. And it reelected him, with increased margins in Congress, in 2004.

So why was all not well in the Republican Party in the months after Bush's reelection? Why, as Democrats wept over the election returns, did a significant segment of the conservative movement weep with them? Why, as activists and students and journalists gathered for CPAC, was there a distinct sense that something was amiss?

Because the marriage at the heart of the conservative movement was falling apart.

To be sure, the relationship's had its rocky patches before. It's always been more Married With Children than Ozzie and Harriet. Whatever alliances have been formed, libertarians have always tended to see social conservatives as rubes ready to thump non-believers on the head with the Bible first chance they get, and social conservatives have always tended to see libertarians as dope-smoking devil worshippers.

The exaggeration's only slight. In 1957, Communist-turned-social-conservative Whittaker Chambers famously wrote of libertarian favorite Ayn Rand that "from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber -- go!'" In 1961, Ronald Hamowy, reviewing the first years of National Review's existence for the libertarian New Individualist Review, blasted editor William F. Buckley Jr. and his colleagues for plotting to reintroduce the burning of heretics. In 1969, a libertarian delegate to the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom, which was holding a convention in St. Louis, burned his draft card on the floor of the convention hall -- sparking a physical confrontation and the tossing out of 300 libertarian YAF members.

The split underway between libertarians and social conservatives today is less dramatic than those of the past -- there are no punches being thrown (yet), and Nazi analogies in contemporary politics are usually confined to the MoveOn.org crowd -- but it is far more profound.

This time, the split is not a spat. It is a slow-but-sure breaking apart.

The sides here are not arguing over one unpopular war, as they were during Vietnam. They are not arguing about any of the various vagaries and fine points of conservative thought that have fueled so many heated internal debates over the decades. They are not fighting over one administration's failure to rein in the size of government, as some conservatives did during the Reagan years.

Today, no longer bound together by the Cold War or opposition to Bill Clinton and having tasted power at the small price of bending their beliefs, the two sides are fighting over nothing less than whether the Republican Party will complete its abandonment of the very principle upon which their fusionist marriage has been based these many years: a commitment to limited government.

Will social conservatives continue to accept federally funded "character education" in lieu of education reforms that would let parents choose their children's schools? Will they continue to accept billions of dollars of government money channeled to religious charities in lieu of reducing the tax burden on Americans so that they could give more money to charity themselves? Will they continue to accept the idea of government as nanny, protecting children from sex and violence in TV shows, movies, video games and every other conceivable medium, in lieu of demanding a society in which parents are expected to be responsible for their own children? Will they continue to embrace the machinery of federal power that they once feared, simply because the "good guys" are the ones pulling the levers for the time being?

In other words: Can social conservatives and libertarians return to the common ground they once shared, or will their differences grow irreconcilable?

The early signs are less than encouraging.

The Bush administration, steered by the thinking of Karl Rove, has adopted a philosophy of big-government conservatism, which joins unrestrained government spending to an aggressive appeal to religious conservatives. It is a philosophy that has led Bush and the Republican Congress to create a $1.2 trillion Medicare prescription-drug benefit, making Bush the first president in a generation to create a new federal entitlement program. It is a philosophy that has led the president to support a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would override the decisions of several state governments on a matter that has traditionally been left to the states. It is a philosophy that has led the president and Congress to undertake a highly politicized intervention into a painful family medical decision, in the case of Terri Schiavo in Florida. And, ultimately, it is a philosophy that has the Republican Party running hard and fast away from the ideas that have been the underpinning of the conservative movement since before Goldwater.

There are many in the Republican Party who believe that now is the time to enjoy the spoils of victory. In truth, however, this is just the beginning of a new war -- a war for the heart and soul of conservatism.

On one side are those conservatives who think that the cause of small government is lost. And if they can't beat big government, they might as well run it. They believe that the battles of the past have been a foolish diversion and that now is the time to adapt to the world as it is and to cease imagining the world as it could be. Some of these people have begun to simply seek power for its own sake. Others have sold their souls in the hope of buying them back one day. Still others have glimpsed a golden opportunity to impose their idea of morality on their fellow citizens. The road to victory has been long and arduous, all of these people recall, and so in their minds there can be no turning back to the discarded ideas of the past.

Yet, there are other conservatives. They are just now waking up to what it is that their party has become: an echo, not a choice. They are realizing that big-government conservatism is no longer an ill-conceived theory, it is the creed of the Republican Party. And they are realizing that far from being "confident and optimistic and forward-leaning," as Karl Rove would have it, this brand of conservatism is weak-kneed, defeatist and retrogressive to a time before giants fused together the coalition that in four decades defeated Communism abroad, halted the march toward socialism at home, lowered taxes and reformed welfare -- just to name a few of its accomplishments.

This is the story of a movement -- an extended family, really -- that rose from humble beginnings to heights it could never have imagined. It's the story of idealists tempted and eventually corrupted by power. And it is the story of old friends torn apart by the pressures and possibilities and pitfalls of success. Most of all, however, it is the story of how these old friends might renew the bonds that have tied them together these many years and recall the ideals and the ideas and the passions that once united them.

The Republican Party stands at a pivotal moment in its history, as was becoming clear to those on the convention floor at CPAC 2005. It can learn to live with big government, determining that it's not so bad, just so long as it's Republicans intruding into the lives of Americans instead of Democrats. Or it can remember its roots and realize that a majority set against its own bedrock principles of limited government and individual liberty is not one worth having -- and, thus, not one that can long sustain.

The marriage between libertarians and social conservatives would certainly not be the first torn apart by power and fortune and success. But the consequences of such a divorce would be uniquely far-reaching. They would be of concern well beyond the expanses of the conservative family -- most acutely, perhaps, to those moderates and liberals already profoundly uncomfortable living under Republican governance, who can only dread what this new, expansionist conservatism might become.

Most aggrieved, however, would be those conservatives who have remained faithful to their small-government vows -- those who know the nobility of what conservatism can be when it holds to its ideal of a limited government that leaves Americans to work and prosper and love and pray, free from the daily diktats of the meddlesome minds in the nation's capital.

The differences between libertarians and social conservatives are not yet irreconcilable. There is a way open toward reconciliation -- a way that revives the old fusion of liberty and tradition, freedom and responsibility, small government and strong government.

But to find it, conservatives of all stripes will have to begin by acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Ryan Sager is a columnist for the New York Post and RealClearPolitics.com. The article above is an excerpt from chapter one of his new book, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.