Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

both the left and the right. But it should be remembered that Buchanan was the first 'compassionate conservative.' 'I may charge him with plagiarism,' Buchanan complained when asked his opinion of George W. Bush's slogan.⁵

Now, Bush's compassionate conservatism differs dramatically in key respects. Buchanan is an immigration restrictionist horrified by the influx of Hispanics into the United States. Bush is famously pro-immigration, arguing that 'family values don't end at the Rio Grande.' Bush is a free trader, a tax cutter, and a moderate on affirmative action. He is eager to bring minorities into the GOP fold. Also unlike Buchanan, he is an internationalist foreign policy hawk with deep sympathy for Israel.

But there is real commonality between them. First, Bush's politics likewise represents a kind of capitulation to a social base. Bush is a representative of 'red state' America in much the way Bill Clinton and, more acutely, John Kerry represent 'blue state' America. In many respects, Bushism is merely a concession to reality. In a polarized political culture, presidents must choose sides to get elected. But such pragmatic concessions do not erase the fact that a politics based on taking care of a constituency with trinkets from the public fisc does profound violence to conservative principles.

Second, both men are products of a new progressive spirit in American politics. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberals believed that the demise of national security as a defining issue would allow them to revive the progressive agenda. They hoped to invest the 'peace dividend' in all manner of Third Way schemes, including neo- corporatist public-private partnerships, emulating the more enlightened industrial policies of Europe and Japan. Bill Clinton borrowed liberally from Kennedy and FDR, melding populist rhetoric ('putting people first') with the new- politics themes of the Kennedy era. The climax of all this was Hillary Clinton's attempt to take over American health care, which in turn released largely libertarian antibodies in the form of the Contract with America and the, alas short-lived, Gingrich revolution. Some very welcome policies and even more encouraging rhetoric — such as welfare reform and Bill Clinton's January 1996 declaration that 'the era of big government is over' — emerged from this tension. But soon enough, the libertarian fever broke when the public sided with President Clinton over the ill-fated government shutdown launched by Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich himself, who'd tried to scuttle various cabinet agencies, was at the same time proclaiming that his speakership represented the dawn of a new Progressive Era, and he has always spoken fondly of earlier generations of liberals. Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Republicans and conservative writers became enthralled with Progressivism. A veritable personality cult developed around Teddy Roosevelt, with one politician after another claiming his mantle — chief among them John McCain, whose fondness for Roosevelt-style regulation borders on legendary.

In the 1990s the Weekly Standard launched a crusade for 'National Greatness' in the tradition of the Rough Rider. David Brooks quoted approvingly Roosevelt's warning that Americans risk getting 'sunk in a scrambling commercialism, heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk.' What was needed to fight off such decay? Roosevelt's 'muscular Progressivism,' of course. If Americans 'think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities,' Brooks warned, 'they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.' Translation: Americans need a politics of meaning. Meanwhile, the Standard's editor, William Kristol, took to denouncing reflexive antigovernment conservatism as immature and counterproductive while his magazine rattled sabers at China and Iraq.⁶

It was from this milieu that 'compassionate conservatism' emerged. Bush's adviser Karl Rove, an ardent fan of Teddy Roosevelt's, offered compassionate conservatism not as an alternative to Clinton's Third Way politics but as a Republican version of the same thing. In 2000 George W. Bush proudly ran as a different kind of conservative, claiming education, single motherhood, and national unity as his themes. Borrowing from Marvin Olasky, the adroit Christian intellectual who coined the phrase 'compassionate conservative,' the Bush team set out to make it clear that they saw the government as an instrument of love, Christian love in particular.

The very adjective 'compassionate' echoes progressive and liberal denunciations of limited government as cruel, selfish, or social Darwinist. In other words, as a marketing slogan alone, it represented a repudiation of the classical liberalism at the core of modern American conservatism because it assumed that limited government, free markets, and personal initiative were somehow 'uncompassionate.'

Nonetheless, conservatives who complain about Bush's 'big-government conservatism' as if it were some great betrayal ignore the fact that they were warned. When Bush responded in a presidential debate in 2000 that his favorite political philosopher was 'Jesus Christ,' small-government conservatives should have sensed the ghost of the Social Gospel. Michael Gerson, Bush's longtime speechwriter and adviser, is unapologetic about his belief that the federal government should be suffused with the spirit of Christian charity. After he left the White House, he wrote a piece for Newsweek, 'A New Social Gospel,' in which he describes the new evangelicals as 'pro-life and pro-poor.' In another Newsweek essay he railed against small-government conservatism, wrung his hands about 'unfettered individualism,' and concluded that 'any political movement that elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs is hardly conservative, and unlikely to win.'⁷

There's no doubt that President Bush believes much of this. In 2003 he proclaimed that 'when somebody hurts,' it's the government's responsibility to 'move.' And under Bush, it has. A new cabinet agency has been created, Medicare has increased nearly 52 percent, and spending on education went up some 165 percent. From 2001 to 2006 antipoverty spending increased 41 percent, and overall spending reached a record $23,289 per household. Federal antipoverty spending has surpassed 3 percent of GDP for the first time ever. Total spending (adjusted for inflation) has grown at triple the rate under Clinton. Moreover, Bush created the largest entitlement since the Great Society (Medicare Part D).

This is not to say that Bush has completely abandoned limited-government conservatism. His judicial appointments, tax cuts, and efforts to privatize Social Security represent either a vestigial loyalty to limited government or a recognition that limited-government conservatives cannot be ignored entirely. But Bush really is a different kind of conservative, one who is strongly sympathetic to progressive-style intrusions into civil society. His faith-based initiative was a well-intentioned attempt to blur the lines between state and private philanthropy. In an interview with the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, Bush explained that he rejected William F. Buckley's brand of reactionary, limited-government conservatism; instead, the president told Barnes that conservatives had to 'lead' and to be 'activist.' This is of a piece with Bush's misunderstanding of conservatism as support for the social base that calls itself 'conservative.'⁸

Bush was not always a captive of his base, of course. Much like his progressive forebears — Clinton, Nixon, FDR, and Wilson — when his agenda differs from that of his most loyal constituents, on immigration or education, he questions their motives as 'uncompassionate.'

What many conservatives, including Bush and Buchanan, fail to grasp is that conservatism is neither identity politics for Christians and/or white people nor right-wing Progressivism. Rather, it is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive. It is the conviction that a properly ordered republic has a government of limited ambition. A conservative in Portugal may want to conserve the monarchy. A conservative in China is determined to preserve the prerogatives of the Communist Party. But in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines.⁹ This is why conservatism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, and Whiggism are different flags for the only truly radical political revolution in a thousand years. The American founding stands within this tradition, and modern conservatives seek to advance and defend it. American conservatives are opposed on principle to neither change nor progress; no conservative today wishes to restore slavery or get rid of paper money. But what the conservative understands is that progress comes from working out inconsistencies within our tradition, not by throwing it away.

Conservatives today are constantly on the defensive to prove that they 'care' about some issue or group, and often they just throw in the towel on the environment, campaign finance reform, or racial quotas in order to prove that they're good people. Even more disturbing, some libertarians are abandoning their historic dedication to negative liberty — preventing the state from encroaching on our freedoms — and embracing a new positive liberty whereby the state does everything it can to help us reach our full potential.¹⁰