Having very strong feelings about “compassionate conservatism” I was tempted to post my own lengthy response to Michael Gerson’s column today. But then I decided I should read John O’Sullivan’s article first. I’m glad I did because it simply blows Gerson away and is all the more persuasive when you see how ineffectual and intellectually unresponsive Gerson’s reply to it is.

That said, one thing that I think is worth pointing out is that Gerson’s column in fact confirms one of the chief complaints against compassionate conservatism, that it is a deliberate insult to traditional conservatives. John writes in part:

My initial response to compassionate conservatism was to feel that it was redundant, vain, and self-serving. It was redundant because relieving poverty and improving the condition of the people have been important strands of every conservatism since Edmund Burke. It was vain because it indulged in an act of moral self-congratulation. And it was self-serving because it suggested that all other conservatisms were lacking in compassion….
To begin with, the idea that libertarian conservatism ignores or despises the poor is a libel. Some eccentric libertarians may do so, but the single most distinguished and influential libertarian conservative in our lifetime was the late Milton Friedman. His focus was on limiting government power — in everything from budgetary policy to narcotics regulation — but Friedman was also the inventor of the negative income tax, education vouchers, and a thousand other schemes to lift people out of poverty.

By way of a partial response, Gerson offers this:

There is, in fact, a long, respectable conservative tradition of modifying or replacing the word “conservatism.” We have seen, in various eras, the coinage of Tory Democracy, progressive conservatism, neoconservatism and national greatness conservatism. And there is a reason for this — because not “every” conservatism has shown an equal concern for the “condition of the people.” Not the slaveholding conservatism of John C. Calhoun, which somehow found torture, rape and stolen labor to be a defensible part of the natural order. Not the isolationist conservatism before World War II that would have left Britain to face evil alone. Not the segregationist conservatism that defended the tradition of humiliating your neighbor. Such “conservatisms” merit hostility.

Let me ignore a lot of silliness here, and parse the relevant point if I can. The good conservatisms — Tory Democracy, “progressive conservatism,” neoconservatism and national greatness conservatism (population 1.5 people) — are set against slave-holding conservatism, segregationist conservatism and (partly-mythological) isolationist conservatism. So which column do libertarian and traditional conservatism belong in? He gives us an answer in the very next paragaph. In the evil column, of course:

More recently (and in an entirely different league of moral offensiveness), there is also the Republican libertarianism of former representative Dick Armey, who once declared Medicare “a program I would have no part of in a free world.” And of fiscal conservatives who proposed to delay the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or eliminate the president’s global AIDS initiative, as an offset for spending on Hurricane Katrina relief.
Sometimes there is nothing more useful than a strong adjective in the drawing of essential distinctions — and “compassionate” will do for now.

He does say that libertarians and fiscal conservatives are much less morally offensive than slaveholders (thank you Mr. Gerson!). But it is quite clear that he considers traditional conservatism to be a sort of ideological villainy, not as evil as slavery or segregationism, but nonetheless lacking any of the nobility or decency of his compassionate or “heroic” conservatism. In short, if you don’t wear his “strong adjective” around your neck, you’re one of the bad guys.

“Compassionate” may indeed be a strong adjective, but it’s an intellectually weak word. As I’ve said countless times before, compassionate conservatism makes perhaps the fundamental mistake of contemporary liberalism: It scores a person’s moral worth by his commitment to giant government initiatives and often ineffectual or counter-productive bureaucracies. (See David Frum’s review of Heroic Conservatism for more on this).

In almost everything Gerson has written about compassionate conservatism, you could replace the word “compassionate” with “Great Society” and it would make more sense. Because the threshhold issue for compassionate Great Society conservatives is how much you “care” about the problem rather than how confident you are the solution will work, there’s no intellectual check on letting your feelings win every contest. As John writes: “compassionate conservatism is less a political philosophy than a romantic cult of sensibility. It responds to ’suffering situations’ but lacks mechanisms for preferring one project to another or for setting an overall limit on government. Thus it liberated the president to ‘move’ when ’somebody hurts’ without first calculating the consequences.”

Update: Yes, I realize this post ended up being lengthy anyway.

Update II: From a reader:

Somewhat ironic that the one villanous conservative Gerson offers up as an example, John C. Calhoun, was the Vice-President of the guy who found the Democratic Party. I’m surprised he didn’t offer up Robert Byrd during his inchoate years as another example.
And then there’s this bit of ironic pile-on:
In 1959 a Senate committee named Calhoun one of the Senate’s five most outstanding members ever (the committee was chaired by Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts)