In Reagan’s Steps
Nick Guillespie
Given how the last eight or so years have worked out for them in far-flung battlefields and domestic ballot boxes, you’d think that conservatives in general and Republicans in particular would be pretty gun-shy about the war rhetoric. But here’s Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Florida congressman, letting it rip in “The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise”: “Congressional leaders will . . . need to take a more prudent path on the environment by declaring war on foreign oil.”
And in case you’re wondering, just saying no to such a glorious future is not an option. “Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Libertarian or a Marxist, understand that it is historically inevitable that the ‘Age of Conservatism’ is coming soon,” Scarborough, the Hegelian author of “Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day” (2004), writes. “The winds of history provide us no other choice.”
If this book is indeed the last best hope of conservatism and America’s promise, well, it was nice knowing you. Ultimately, Scarborough offers what Barry Goldwater might have called an echo, not a choice, of a Bush-Obama status quo regarding everything from bailouts to stimulus spending to rendition policy. He unwittingly tells us that conservatives can at best stand athwart history yelling “Slow down,” but they can’t fundamentally change its direction.
To be sure, Scarborough is the host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, the most consistently engaging morning talk show on cable television. His co-host, Mika Brzezinski, and a stable of regulars that includes the accused plagiarist Mike Barnicle and the John Demjanjuk enthusiast Pat Buchanan (as well as the editor of the Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus) are a genuinely spirited crew who discuss and debate the news of the day with a mixture of conviction, knowledge and humor that is all too rare. Compared with, say, “Fox & Friends,” “Morning Joe” is the Algonquin Round Table on steroids, or at least Vivarin.
Yet “The Last Best Hope” is less a serious manifesto (the book quotes the conservative saint Russell Kirk and the mawkish singer Sarah McLachlan) than a breezy bull session. Scarborough argues that right-wingers seeking to recapture Ronald Reagan’s box office mojo need to embrace environmentalism (they should be “Going green for God”); acknowledge the permanence of troubled entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (“Everyone is going to have to give until it hurts”); and pursue a humble foreign policy (except when they don’t: “Most Republicans, including myself, were steadfast in their support for the war” in Iraq).
On contentious social issues like abortion and gay marriage, the heirs to Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. should push for decisions to be made at the state level — not necessarily because localized decision-making provides better answers but because “that is the only way to protect the advances conservatives have made over the past generations.” Most of all, Scarborough counsels, conservatives need to channel their inner Gipper by “following the advice of Jesus and the example of Reagan, by trying more often to turn the other cheek” during fractious policy debates.
This may be sound strategy, but such sentiments certainly don’t provide a true alternative to the surplus of centralized solutions emanating from Washington, at least since George W. Bush and a Republican Congress championed the Medicare prescription drug benefit, passed No Child Left Behind and created the enormous Department of Homeland Security.
Scarborough dedicates his book “to conservatives of all parties,” in homage to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek, whose 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom,” was dedicated “to the socialists of all parties.” If he were interested in pointing out a truly different direction, Scarborough would have done well to grok more Hayek and less McLachlan. In the essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek noted that conservatism is a reactionary impulse that “by its very nature cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.” At most, Hayek said, it might succeed in “slowing down undesirable developments.”
Instead, Hayek pushed a decentralist, libertarian line because he believed that none of us has a monopoly on truth or knowledge, and that “to live and work successfully with others requires . . . an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which . . . others are allowed to pursue different ends.” In such thoughts is the beginning of a very different political program and, not coincidentally, one that might go much farther in restoring “America’s promise” than supporting “increased funding for school lunch programs by 4 percent instead of 6 percent.”
Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv.
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