Conservatism's Regeneration
by Donald Devine
September 16, 2009
The health care town meetings this past summer awakened the Phoenix " the mythical bird, not the city " of conservatism to rise alive again from the ashes of the dilapidated body of the moribund conservative movement. The giant rally at the Capitol on Saturday culminated the largest outpouring of freedom activism in decades, perhaps ever.
Everyone outside the Washington D.C. beltway knows the institutional conservative movement had become comatose. It still had the glitter and the funds but it had long since lost passion and a motivating mission. That is changing. George W. Bush had issued the coup de grace when he broke all records for government spending, not on foreign policy but racking up the largest spending on domestic programs of any preceding American president.
President Bush was not a MAC
The modern conservative movement stood for many things but a central one was the idea of limited government. President Bush disagreed, famously preaching “when someone hurts, government must act.” The problem was that when the president proceeded to turn his philosophy into action through new federal controls of education, prescription drugs, energy, housing, banking, investment, autos and the rest, the institutional conservative movement generally supported him " or at least muted opposition, undermining its credibility. Conservatism’s grass roots, its believing activist base, became discouraged and disengaged.
Republican leaders also abdicated conservative principles
Nearly every Republican leader was implicated in this abnegation of principle so there was no place to turn for help. As Chip Hanlon of California’s Red County blog reports below, when he interviewed a prominent Republican Congressional leader recently he was told “ You may be concerned with what you perceive to be our 'failings' on spending, but it was Iraq, and Iraq alone, which put us into the minority." He cited the polls as proof that “if you take away the Iraq War, which was funded by debt, we did a pretty good job on spending.” Notice, this “leader” does not even know he presided over the largest domestic spending spree ever! How clueless can one get in the midst of a popular revolt against excessive government spending? There is no hope from such a party under such leadership.
Grass roots conservatives do not agree with Congressional leaders
Fortunately for the GOP, President Barack Obama is even more obtuse, deciding to take the Bush spending and ratchet it up exponentially, especially on health care. While the Republican leadership in Congress, the party, business and even some of the rightist intellectual community is lusting for a deal on health care, the grass roots want none of it. When Congress adjourned for August and announced it wanted to hear from the public, it heard much more than it wanted. Grass roots conservatives turned out in droves and they were joined by many moderates and even liberals. Folks did not like what they were hearing from their leaders, both Republican and Democratic, that it was government control of medicine, like it or not.
While some of the conservative national groups, especially Freedom Works, Campaign for Liberty, and Americans for Prosperity, tried to organize grass roots participation, the ordinary folks were way ahead of them. Your author happened to be the chairman of the coalition of conservative organizations against HillaryCare in 1993 and we did organize 40 or so regional town hall meetings in opposition. But there is no comparison. This year was not organized top down but bottom up. It is more like grass roots opposition to catastrophic health reform in 1965 when activists took off on their own, including physically assaulting the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, actually leading to the repeal of the bill passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress the preceding year.
The grass roots and the Administration lie
What was different this time was the pent-up frustration on the right with the Bush program plus the fact that Rep. Ron Paul had attracted a core of young people on a platform of limited, constitutional government that provided a catalyst for the activist base. The Paul supporters had had incredible success with on-line spontaneous fundraising (more than Obama at one point) and with mass meetings and forums - not “knowing” mass politics was dead. So they were willing to try - and succeeded, in small groups and individually through email, Twitter and the like. The American Conservative Union was wise enough to know these folks did not want to be led so decided merely to record it, publicize it and give support to it.
To argue, as has the White House, this was organized surreptitiously by the drug or insurance or the medical companies is delusional. In fact, the White House had lured them into their deliberations and they mostly supported the Obama plan. The idea that the government would force everyone to be insured would be a boon for their balance sheets (at least in the short run) and they even lobbied Congress to obtain this new business. Likewise, in 2004, these companies were the ones responsible for running ads in Republican districts where the Congressman was opposed to the prescription drug bill, scaring them into support. This time they played even worse hardball. Medicines Company and another drug firm, Sinofi Pasteur, forced their lobbyist DLA Piper to push former House majority leader Dick Armey from his job at that firm because he was also the chairman of Freedom Works, which was working to defeat the Obama bill.
The debate within conservatism
No, the summer tea party revolution was not from the top. Institutional conservatism was just too compromised after Bush to rouse by itself this new mass of Americans concerned about what government will do to ruin their valued health and political systems. The intellectual case that government intervention is the root cause of the health crisis and that it will produce bankruptcy in the years ahead had not been made by any major political figure in years. Indeed, many conservatives have taken the position that the government health system is sacrosanct and should not be changed at all in order to rouse elderly opposition, ignoring the stacks of rightist think tank reports detailing the urgent need to put patients in charge rather than bureaucrats as the only way to prevent bankruptcy and rationed health care.
Conservatism post-Bush has been opportunistic rather than principled. If the GOP took control of Congress tomorrow, as indicated by a recent op-ed by the party chairman Michael Steele and what the Republican Congressional leader reinforced in California, there is no question it would support some compromise solution that would make the health care system more inefficient, more unfair and more expensive, further hastening insolvency.
The good news is that a critical mass at the grass roots is seeing through the bipartisan tomfoolery and will not take it any longer. Beyond the sloganeering Congressional speeches, the formulistic think tank studies and the hot air TV expert commentary, an exhausted conservative movement is being regenerated by activists who really care about political principles and are determined to do something serious to advance them. Conservatism’s regeneration is happening just as it did in the 1960s, out in the country, spontaneously, below the establishment radar, awaiting a leader and a favorable opportunity.
Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.
http://acuf.org/issues/issue139/090910news.asp 
It costs me extra $12 per year for outside Europe- and Mediterranean Sea countries countries, for all including in my insurance (in my case just my wife).
