OPINION:
For the past 15 years, veteran Republican leader Mickey Edwards has been complaining about the state of American conservatism. Conservatives have usually responded by complaining that Mr. Edwards has gone soft in his old age.
Case in point: In 1993, Mr. Edwards penned an op-ed for the Boston Herald in which he upbraided Republican critics of retiring House Minority Leader Bob Michel for devouring their elders. He protested that “if what drives Bob Michel out of Congress is his party’s frenzied drive toward irrelevance and dissolution, the entire nation will suffer.”
Fellow Herald columnist Don Feder retorted that Mr. Edwards — whom he described as “a longtime Oklahoma congressman who was booted after placing third in last year’s Republican primary” — was giving “advice Republicans can do without.”
The debate over Mr. Edwards’ new book, “Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost — and How It Can Find Its Way Back,” is likely to sound much the same. Mr. Edwards, currently a lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has penned a trenchant critique of the conservative movement and its current relationship with the Republican Party. Most conservatives are likely to see it as advice they can live without.
In some cases, that’s so much the worse for conservatives. Mr. Edwards is right that self-styled conservative Republicans have gotten too comfortable with big government at home and abroad. From approving the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society to accepting expansions of executive power they would not have granted a Democratic administration, the Bush-era GOP has muddled its small-government branding and traveled far down the road from Goldwater-Reagan conservatism.
Mr. Edwards argues this older form of conservatism was more faithful to the Constitution. It might also have kept the Republicans from overreaching and endangering their longstanding reputation as the party most competent to handle the nation’s fiscal and foreign affairs. The grand old spending party didn’t mollify clients of big government for long. The right’s more libertarian tendencies have gone missing without producing any lasting electoral gains.
Unfortunately, Mr. Edwards often seems more interested in settling scores with his least favorite conservative factions than charting a coherent new course for the right. He simultaneously criticizes Republicans for being insufficiently supportive of individual freedom and too antigovernment. He ignores distinctions between the early Gingrich Congress, which at least tried to rein in federal spending, and its successors who have increased expenditures.
The conservatives most likely to agree with him on habeas corpus and congressional power would be surprised by his contention that federal court jurisdiction stripping is somehow illegitimate.
Mr. Edwards is particularly critical of the religious right, oblivious to the fact that his support for federally guaranteed legal abortion is inconsistent with his call for a federalist approach to same-sex marriage. He criticizes social conservatives for wanting to write their policy preferences into law but seems perfectly willing to do the same.
Social conservatives are not without flaws, but it is impossible to imagine a center-right American governing majority without them. Mr. Edwards’ distaste for certain kinds of conservatives clouds his political judgments.
Ernest Istook, the Oklahoma religious conservative who succeeded Mr. Edwards in Congress, may have been a disaster as a gubernatorial candidate but he held that seat for 14 years and handed it to another Republican. Similarly, the shift from Bob Michel to Newt Gingrich coincided with the first GOP House majority in 40 years rather than “irrelevance and dissolution.”
The author’s angry tone is sure to turn off all but the most disgruntled conservatives who don’t need any persuading. Arguments against warrantless wiretapping and engagements like the Iraq war have fine a conservative pedigree and deserve a hearing on the right. Mr. Edwards doesn’t write as if he is interested in a dialogue or a debate with the average Republican reader and seems unclear about who is actually going to go about the task of reclaiming conservatism.
This is too bad, since Mr. Edwards documents that there is much in the conservative tradition that our country would benefit from reclaiming. The trouble with his book is the vast amount of authentic conservatism its author would discard.
W. James Antle III is associate editor of the American Spectator.
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