Isaiah J. Poole is executive editor of TomPaine.com. Bill Scher, who is blogging the Conservative Political Action Conference (http://blog.ourfuture.org/) for Campaign for America's Future contributed to this article.
Conservatives are nothing if not stubborn. Having lost control of Congress in 2006 and finding themselves badly divided since, activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this weekend are telling themselves that they only need to go back to the roots of their ideology to regain political hegemony. Of course, their roots, to borrow a phrase from their hero, Ronald Reagan, are not the solution to their problem; their roots are the problem, and the crowd whipping itself into a righteous frenzy at a hotel just outside of downtown D.C. willfully refuses to see that.
You don’t have to look further than the opening address delivered Thursday by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who is the Senate’s lead voice of conservative Republicans. To DeMint, the 2006 election was not a defeat for conservatism but was the result of voters being “confused.” Well, on that score, actually, he may have a point. Voters who were drilled to believe that Republicans stood for fiscal discipline, efficient management of government and ethical behavior were certainly confused when conservatism’s iron grip on the White House and Congress produced record budget deficits, the cataclysmic failures of Hurricane Katrina and the departures in disgrace of Republican congressmen Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Bob Ney and Mark Foley.
But DeMint’s point was to lay out three core values “that have made America great” and that for conservatives should be “the prisms through which we must evaluate all of our policy decisions.” He called them “individualism, capitalism and volunteerism.” What they are really is this: You are on your own, greed is good and, yeah, a little bit of charity is not a bad thing—but don’t feel obligated.
DeMint spoke of people having “the capabilities to succeed in a free society,” of free markets where “consumers can make their own decisions” and of citizens who care for each other and their communities without “government coercion.” It sounds so appealing, until you review how conservatives have, over the past three decades, perverted the highest forms of those values into government policies that are heartless, corrupt and corrosive to the economic political and spiritual underpinnings of the country.
Unlike conservatives, progressives do not believe that government is an obstacle to freedom and shared prosperity. Rather, government is an instrument that the people can use to ensure both freedom and fairness, a vehicle through which the nation expresses its concern for the common good, the product of our realization that our greatness as a nation demands more than tossing spare change into a tin cup. It requires a shared commitment to lift up the least among us.
But a sizable segment of the American public doesn’t see government this way because conservatives have succeeded in convincing the public that government can’t do anything right. “Despite the endless propaganda against conservative ideals, the American people know that the government is wasteful and incompetent,” DeMint said—and in fact, in conservative hands, that is exactly what it has been. Consider the shameful conditions that injured Iraq veterans had to endure at Walter Reed Army Medical Center under Bush appointees, until two weeks ago when The Washington Post placed a graphic story of vermin- and mold-infested facilities on its front page. That prompted embarrassed officials into political damage control when the pleas of the veterans themselves fell on deaf ears.
Or, worse, consider the obscenity of the Iraq war itself—along with the official deceptions, the political exploitation, the routine depravity that overflowed at Abu Ghraib, the war profiteering of contractors owned by Republican cronies, the high-level bungling and the complete disregard for basic Constitutional principles. There is no worse waste than the waste of more than 3,164 American soldiers who have died in the Iraq occupation—the fruit of President Bush’s embrace of conservatism’s worst imperial instincts.
So, one of the signature conferences of the conservative moment kicked off with a reaffirmation of an ideology riddled with fallacies—a philosophy that talks of individualism but uses government to limit individual rights to the theologically correct, talks of values and responsibilities but is unwilling to constrain business interests to live up to a reasonable set of values and responsibilities, talks of compassion but is passionate only when it comes to protecting the wealthy.
To listen to CPAC speakers, you would not know that while conservatives argued vociferously against a minimum wage increase—many would do away with the measly $5.15 an hour that exists today—81 percent of Americans in a Los Angeles Times /Bloomberg poll favor a federal minimum wage hike, and voters in 17 states voted to raise their minimum wage in 2006. You would not know that 79 percent of adults in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll said Medicare should negotiate with drug companies for lower prices rather than accept the conservative view that the government should not have the same ability as the private sector to use its market power. You would not know that while conservatives talk about ending poor people’s dependence on government, 61 percent of adults in the Los Angeles Times poll say oil companies should lose the tax breaks and subsidies they received from the Republican Congress. Just two weeks ago, an Associated Press/Ipsos poll found that 68 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is headed on the wrong track. The repudiation of conservatism’s bitter fruits is resounding.
So conservatives at the CPAC conference are for the most part snarling like wounded, cornered dogs, saying things on Thursday like "we cannot let Mexico turn us into a two-language nation" (the Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schafly), "the rich are getting screwed" as a result of government aid programs for the poor (Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation) and that because of media and advertising, “lesbianism among young women has risen dramatically in the last 10 years alone.”
Having failed to deliver what DeMint called the “conservative promise” of “unlimited opportunity and freedom, more jobs, more income, more choices, more security, more faith and more hope for the future,” conservatives at CPAC apparently think that invoking the old -isms and phobias of the past will have voters scurrying back to their tent. That leaves the field wide open for progressives to offer disillusioned voters policies that actually deliver on the promise of opportunity, freedom and prosperity for everyone.
