02/15/07
The final paragraph of George Will's recent column has something going for it:
If the defining doctrine of the Republican Party is limited government, the party must move up from nostalgia and leaven its reverence for Reagan with respect for Madison. As Diggins says, Reaganism tells people comforting and flattering things that they want to hear; the Madisonian persuasion tells them sobering truths that they need to know.
But the bulk of the column before that is Burkean overkill.
Further, the idea (expressed by the author of the book under review) that Reaganism led to Big Government Conservatism . . .
"An unmentionable irony," writes Diggins, is that big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. "Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it." Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government -- a dispenser of unending entitlements -- they will get ever larger government. But how can people have a bad conscience after being told (in Reagan's First Inaugural) that they are all heroes? And after being assured that all their desires, which inevitably include desires for government-supplied entitlements, are good?
. . . strikes me as something preciously close to nonsense. It forgets the other factors in American life. It blames Reagan for the excesses of Bush and the treason of later Republican legislators. This is idiotic.
The problem for Republicans is really pretty easy. It has nothing to do with our alleged good desires. It has everything to do with consistently choosing power and success over principles.
Reagan's own problems were his compromises with principles, too. He figured that winning the Cold War was more important than balancing any budget. He allowed the Democrats to increase domestic government if he could increase military spending. That was the basic deal.
The idea that this trade-off was of an Emersonian nature seems . . . ridiculous.
And please note: I say this as a long-standing critic of the Pelagian Heresy and the Man Is Good argument. My vision of man is quite constrained! (My first review to appear in a magazine was an appreciative view of Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.)
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