The rise — at least temporarily — of Rick Santorum has given rise to speculation of late, most notably by David Brooks, that it might facilitate a rethinking on the right about how America addresses some of the hard-to-deny social pathologies that characterize much of American society. Chiming in to this debate is Michael Gerson. He argues that Santorum’s approach to such matters reflects an alternative religiously influenced conservative tradition (“compassionate conservatism”) to what Gerson regards as the libertarian knee-jerk anti-government position.
There is, however, something dissatisfying about all this. On the one hand, self-described compassionate conservatives understand there is no such thing as morally neutral laws or morally indifferent government policies. At some level (even quite remote), all laws and policies embody some type of moral logic (which is either coherent or incoherent). Thus they cannot help but shape — for better and worse — a society’s moral culture. That’s just one reason among many why the legal treatment of issues like abortion, euthanasia, pornography, and marriage matters, and why they can’t, as some libertarians claim, be simply relegated to the private sphere.
At the same time, it seems to me that many compassionate conservatives don’t fully appreciate the moral, social, and legal urgency of reducing the state’s size and reach, instead of primarily focusing upon streamlining government’s role. The capacity, for example, of even well-intentioned government interventions and apparently benign public-private partnerships to help facilitate dysfunctional families as well as suck the life out of the rich mosaic of free associations and autonomous institutions often conceptually cobbled together under the rubric of civil society has been exhaustively documented. Moreover, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the sheer number of laws and regulations that now govern our lives represents a genuine threat to rule of law, inasmuch as the sheer profusion of laws increases the potential for arbitrary decisions by courts and governments, including by those who don’t want to act arbitrarily.
All these problems suggest that some conservatives need to pay much more attention to the precise limits of government in free societies when it comes to social policy. As it happens, the limits of government are also the number one topic in contemporary economic debates as the United States struggles to avoid being drawn into the social-democratic quagmire which today we call Europe.
No doubt it won’t be possible to resolve all the differences between compassionate conservatives and libertarians on the subject of the limits of state power. Their starting points for intellectual reflection are usually different. But such a discussion might provide some basis for a broader and deeper “non-left” critique of the modern Left’s slavish attachment to big government and the not-so-noble underlying motivations behind all the feelings-talk and empathy-babble for endlessly expanding its reach.
— Samuel Gregg is research director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy, and his 2012 forthcoming Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and America’s Future.
-clap clap clap-
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell said.
Excellent post. I would add that social conservatives have made a serious error in thinking everything follows culture. Granted, government will reflect the culture, but it also shapes it. In an age when government at all levels is consuming 40% of all resources and regulating every aspect of life, fixing the culture is a fools errand. You cannot win.
Further, culture is local. This is a big country and full of pockets of weirdness. The homogenizing effects of socialism are blotting out much of it. Shrinking the state lets all that weirdness bloom again. The people of Iowa, for example, can have the evangelical dream if they are free from federal interference. The people of Mass can install abortion mills in their grammar schools, free of the leviathan.
The bottom line is we would not have a culture war if the Federal government were a third of its current size.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The people of Iowa, for example, can have the evangelical dream if they are free from federal interference. The people of Mass can install abortion mills in their grammar schools." If anything goes, not only will you not have a culture war; you won't have a culture.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou clearly don't understand the power of the States. The States are the safeguard of culture. Not the Federal Government, I agree that abortion is an evil, and a culture that tolerates it is degenerate. But the Federal government was never given the constitutional authority to regulate that aspect of human behavior. The States were.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseExcellent post. Social conservatives must concentrate more on civil society and less on government. I very much appreciate Rick Santorum's outspoken moral and cultural conservatism, but his over-reliance on government to achieve conservative ends gives me some pause. There is a lot that big government can do to damage the social fabric, but much less that it can do to fix it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseExcellent comments. I would add that "compassionate conservatism" didn't help the country when in the first year of Bush's tenure, he enacted a tax schedule that created negative tax rates. Why he did this, I'm not positive, but I'd guess it had something to do with voices like Gerson's in the White House that insistently beat the drums of "fairness".
Welfare reform was a tremendous (loosely) bi-partisan achievement in the the mid-'90-s. And yet, just a few years later, George Bush's tax cuts undid - either by accident or intent - all the good the welfare reform accomplished. In fact, it made matters worse. At least with welfare, it's fairly easy to see who's dependent on government largess and who isn't. But, when people are receiving a $25K IRS "refund" after only paying annual withholding of $10K, there's absolutely no way to accurately measure or record that $15K transfer payment.
People will be for "bigger government" so long as it continues to cost them the same - which in 47% of the country is nothing. And, with a fairly significant percentage of those who pay nothing, they actually receive an annual payment because of the negative tax rate they enjoy.
THAT is the disaster that compassionate conservatism has visited on the country.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCompassionate conservatism was never tried under the Bush Administration because the secular left and their allies in the media screamed bloody murder about the separation of church and state. Not sure why you bring up the tax cut discussion.
You are a practical guy, Scott. You know we will not win an election by simply cutting all federal government benefits to the poor.
However, to take a fraction of the money needed to meet the same needs, by channeling it through private charity that can discriminate based on need and responsibility and not entitlement - plus cutting off a large part of the massive bureaucracy which wastes so much additional taxes - all sounds good to this conservative.
Side benefit, people see their aid coming from their neighbor, not the government (i.e. Obama's stash)
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Compassionate conservatism was never tried under the Bush Administration because the secular left and their allies ..."
Oh, brother. Sound familiar?
"Communism has never actually been tried because the West and its allies ..."
Compassionate conservatism doesn't work because it's a bad idea. Who wants to vote for the "diet" Democrat Party?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSmart!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think it is a lot simpler and more base. Much of the "libertarian vs compassionate conservatism" split, and particularly the recent Iowa/NRO love fest for Santorum, are motivated out of a pro and anti religious tribalism.
Many libertarians are militantly anti-Christian, and seek to minimize government because it is a vehicle to minimize religious interference in their lives (recognizing that the majority remains Christian, and will impose Christian morality to varying degrees). At the same time, many Christians instinctively leap to defend people like Bush, Huckabee, and Santorum - despite their big government tendencies - BECAUSE of those men's religious belief. He's "one of us", so to speak. Never mind that all three men have no respect for state sovereignty or any sense of limited federal gov't - they are Christian so we must support them.
The only way to bridge the gap is to stick to traditional federalism (Reagan's coalition), where moral issues are (to the maximum extent possible) left to the population of each state to decide, and the federal government is restricted to only Constitutionally enumerated issues. Libertarians can thus gather in their own states and legalize drugs, and social cons can gather in their states and ban Sunday alcohol sales and SSM.
Unfortunately, now that the social cons have tasted power under GWB, they've given up the federalism game and are backing the ONLY guy in the Republican field who actually rejects the 10th Amendment. Santorum reveals the truth... "compassionate conservatives" are the dreaded moral busybodies that CS Lewis warned us about. Under Santorum types, it is not the 13th Amendment that allows the feds to prohibit state legalization of slavery, but rather some amorphous "national morality". And this same "national morality" - under Santorum thinking - allows DC politicians to trump any "inappropriate" local moral decisions.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"... rather some amorphous "national morality""
What you mean is Santorum's whim that day. Let's just call it for what it is, the capriciousness of king.
Who's going to vote for someone running to be the President of Morality-As-I-Define-It?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell said. We've tried "compassionate conservatism," and the state continued (with help from Rich Santorum) to grow in size and scope.
How about just "conservatism" this time around? And given the Left Turn all the other candidates have taken in bashing the one private-sector guy in the race for being ... successful in the private sector, it looks like Romney is the one who will be our best shot at plain, not-compassionate conservatism.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf you could pinpoint where the Republican Party started going the wrong direction, it was when they started following the "compassionate conservative" path to fiscal ruin.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Their starting points for intellectual reflection are usually different."
I must remember that. As diplomatically articulated as I believe is possible.
Captcha (ironically) : fellow traveller
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere is no such thing as a morally neutral law or policy.
It is, however, morally neutral to lack a law or policy for something. "Not under government control" is the natural state of the universe -- which is why, for example, the Sun doesn't have to submit any paperwork before rising in the morning.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusecapcha: whoa there
Yes, we indeed have seen compassionate conservatism. We had eight years of it with Geo W Bush. Big government, big program, big spending.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe compassionate conservatives could start by using respectful language to describe libertarian leaning republicans and their favorite candidate.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Compassionate conservatism" presumes, in line with the progressive media-capitalist crony complex, that conservatism is not compassionate. Conservatism is by far more compassionate than the alternative view that the individual is no more than a cog in the State's machinery, to be kept oiled and functional until past the point of usefulness and then discarded.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf benevolent associations are so good at managing people's lives, then Gerson, Brooks and Frum can all get together and create the Self-Righteous Moderate-Conservative Foundation to help all the little people with the problems they can't figure out for themselves.
If instead they just want to use the force of the state to extract compliance from the unruly citizenry for grand plans, then I think we already have our answer on whether such plans can improve society.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI suggest we replace compassionate conservatives with constitutional conservatives at the earliest opportunity.
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