"Stop moping around," former Governor Jeb Bush told an audience of conservatives convened by the National Review in Washington last weekend. That wasn't quite fair. The wingers weren't exactly moping. They seemed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the election of 2006, wandering about in a state of shock, certain that it wasn't a failure of principles that had led them back into the political wilderness. "I've just come from our Republican congressional retreat," said Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "The leaders asked the caucus why we thought we'd lost our majority. Was it the war in Iraq? About a third of the hands went up. Was it corruption? About a dozen hands. Was it that we'd lost our way on spending and the need for small government? The majority of hands went up ... The American people came to believe that we're the party of Big Government. That's why they threw us out." Actually, no: it was Iraq and corruption. And worse, it can be argued that the failure in Iraq and the moral sloppiness that overtook the late, great Republican Congress were direct consequences of a 25-year political pendulum swing to the right, which has resulted in a vaulting arrogance overseas and a profound disrespect for good governance at home.
This was the first Washington "summit" since 1994 convened by the National Review, the magazine that helped found the modern conservative movement, and I must say that its followers have several things going for them: they are decorous and erudite. The presidency of George W. Bush elicited polite disdain compared with the ferocious ideological nuking that Bill Clinton suffered at the hands of the left wing of his party when Democratic postmortems were held after the 1994 congressional debacle. The intellectual quality of the proceedings was impressive but, as is always the case with ideologues, myopic. Churchill was cited extravagantly, but it was always the lonely, courageous Churchill warning about Hitler in the 1930s rather than the failed, frustrated Churchill who presided over Britain's Mesopotamian disaster in the 1920s, a folly largely of his own making.
Indeed, the Churchillian Fallacy seems very much at the heart of the conservative misreading of the Islamist challenge. Speaker after speaker compared the jihadis to Nazis and communists, as the President did two or three speech-cycles ago. There was a lot of melodramatic spew about this being the beginning stage of World War III or IV. John O'Sullivan, the National Review's editor-at-large, predicted major geostrategic shifts ahead, with the Europeans slipping over to the dark side at the behest of their Islamic immigrant populations. "Do you think," one summit-goer asked me, in an eruption of overwrought historicity, "this is 1914, 1938, 1942 or 1972?"
How about none of the above? It should be obvious by now that the Bush Administration's attempt to inflate a serious long-term conflict with the forces of radical Islam into a Global War on Terror has been a monumental strategic mistake. But there was little sympathy for figuring out an intelligent way to disengage from Iraq and refocus attention on the broader conflict. My esteemed colleague William Kristol, whose latest column appears on the next page, easily won the crowd with his argument favoring Bush's New Way Forward in Iraq, though not without a few bumps. Kristol, normally an impeccable debater, seemed boggled by this simple question from the audience: "How do we know if we're winning or losing? Whose side are we on in Iraq?" Kristol detoured into the Korean War, then cited the three democratic elections held in Iraq, which were little more than ethnic referendums, and advanced the astonishing notion that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was actually presiding over a "coalition government" rather than acting as beard for the Shi'ite militias. Not very convincing.
The essential conundrum of 21st century conservatism--the notion that smaller government is what conservatives really want--was betrayed in three debates pitting libertarians against traditionalists on issues like immigration, gay marriage and the need for an alternative-energy plan. By my reckoning, the libertarians won none of them. My favorite moment came when Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute began pacing behind the podium, pulling his chin as he realized that his "let the market decide" rhetoric wasn't going over very well against former CIA Director Jim Woolsey's argument that, as a matter of national security, the U.S. government should support hybrid technology and alternative fuels. Taylor actually proposed that the poverty and dissatisfaction such a policy might cause in places like Saudi Arabia might create more terrorists!
In the end, the conservatives had little to unite them except, as always, lower taxes. "You have to cut taxes whenever you can," Jeb Bush proposed, "or government will grow faster than people's ability to pay for it." Huh? Bush's assumption was Ronald Reagan's: that "government" is part of the problem, not part of the solution. In truth, it is neither: it is the concrete expression of our collective will. And if you want to govern as a responsible conservative, you have to pay for it--especially when you're fighting a global "war."