Compassionate Protectionism
Just in case you think “compassionate conservatism” is a meaningless phrase — you're right.

June 22, 2001 2:10 p.m.

ust in case you think "compassionate conservatism" is a meaningless phrase that can be attached to just about any policy, you should know — you're right.

The other day brought one of the more egregious uses of the term. Justifying the administration's support of protectionism for the steel industry, Bush trade representative Robert Zoellick said: "Open markets improve the lives of people by increasing opportunity, choice, and economic freedom. But 'compassionate conservatism' also recognizes the reality that the effects of rapid change fall harder on some communities and industries."

Now, what was supposed to be radical about "compassionate conservatism," its defenders told us, was that it would highlight the latent compassion in conservatism, the way conservative policies would better help people and families in distress. School vouchers would be the ur-compassionate conservative idea in this conception.

But skeptics always worried that it was instead a weaselly way to distance Bush from traditional conservatism, and that it surrendered to the Left the idea of there being something notable and new and utterly distinctive about a conservatism that is compassionate.

And this indeed is the import of Zoellick's comment (which is just one comment — but a telling one): What's compassionate isn't conservatism, but its opposite. Protectionism, instead of being a market distortion that hurts everyone, including the poor who have to pay more for consumer goods, is the caring solution.

By extension, this reasoning could apply to the rest of the liberal agenda — there isn't anything that makes steel quotas markedly different from any other regulatory policy. A conservative, then, by this way of thinking, can be considered compassionate to the extent that he surrenders.

So, maybe Bush really is a compassionate conservative. He's conservative on tax cuts, missile defense, and Social Security. He's compassionate on Vieques, steel quotas, and California price caps.

Maybe this is a defensible political posture, but why it should be considered a great theoretical departure, or a boon to conservatism, is a mystery.