The heart of conservatism, as elucidated by its progenitor, Edmund Burke, is a healthy respect for the messy, inconsistency-laden reality of human institutions as they have actually evolved across generations. Such institutions are necessarily imperfect, but have value by the simple virtue of having withstood pressure over time. You discard such institutions only with great caution; what is destroyed overnight can take decades to rebuild. This is where we get the very term “conservative”; conservatives believe in the conservation of human institutions and values. Conversely, the word “radical” derives from the Latin for “roots,” because radicalism is all about digging things up at the roots and starting over.
Both impulses have their place in society. But our national politics have reached the strange tipping point at which the two labels have become reversed: they now hang from the necks of our politicians and parties like mixed-up nametags.
The Republican, “red state” agenda can be called “conservative” only by force of habit. Abroad, President Bush pursues a messianic vision, one part religious war and one part democratic crusade, neither pursued with any consistency but both leading to regime changes, bloodshed and the casual abandonment of carefully built institutions and alliances. At home, Bush, having enacted massive changes to the federal tax structure that are steadily bankrupting the government, seeks to scuttle Social Security, the most successful social program in American history.
The president is a radical. It is his Democratic opponents, fighting a rearguard action to protect the institutions of the liberal state that their predecessors built over the last century, who are now conservatives.
I’m thinking in this framework as I ponder the Senate’s “nuclear option” mess. (For a guide to the intricacies of this contorted political conflict, there’s no better starting point than Tim Grieve’s Q&A in today’s Salon.) What’s interesting about the Senate’s procedural civil war is how completely the Republicans, in their triumphant eternal Now, have taken their eye off the past and the future. The past tells us that every party in power sooner or later falls out of the majority. In the future, the Republicans will surely want and need the filibuster that they are so gung-ho to eliminate today.
The Senate leadership’s inability or unwillingness to imagine a future shoe-on-the-other-foot scenario has an analogue in the administration’s casual attitude toward the Geneva Accords and other safeguards against torture. The military has traditionally understood the vital importance of sticking to these agreements, even with despicable and immoral enemies, because it’s the only way you have any hope of insuring that your own people won’t be tortured when they end up in the other side’s prisons. But the Bush administration’s end-justifies-the-means thinking has left this tradition in tatters.
Having squeaked into the White House twice in a row, these guys, it seems, can’t picture a future in which they are no longer running the world. And their short-sightedness is not only beginning to wreck the government; it’s trashing their own conservative tradition. I can’t claim to understand why. Perhaps the millennarian streak of the religious right provides those under its sway with a sort of safety hatch: Like Jim Morrison said, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near. If the end times are nigh, then why worry about the Democrats regaining the majority in a de-filibustered Senate? But I think it’s less likely that the Republican leadership is counting on the apocalypse than that they’re just slaves to short-term thinking.
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