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Jewish World Review Nov. 16, 2012/ 2 Kislev, 5773 Compassionate conservatism redux By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I think I owe an apology to
The end of the Cold War gave way to what He called his new approach to domestic policy "compassionate conservatism." For years, I've criticized "compassionate conservatism" as an insult to traditional conservatism and an affront to all things libertarian. Bush liked to say that he was a "different kind of Republican," that he was a "compassionate conservative." I hated -- and still hate -- that formulation. Imagine if someone said, "I'm a different kind of Catholic (or Jew, or American, etc.): I'm a compassionate Catholic." The insinuation was -- by my lights, at least -- that conservatives who disagreed with him and his "strong-government conservatism" were somehow lacking in compassion. As a candidate, Bush distanced himself from the Gingrich "revolutionaries" of the 1994 Compassionate conservatism always struck me as a philosophical surrender to liberal assumptions about the role of the government in our lives. A hallmark of Great Society liberalism is the idea that an individual's worth as a human being is correlated to his support for massive expansions of the entitlement state. Conservatives are not uncompassionate. (Indeed, the data show that conservatives are more charitable with their own money and more generous with their time than liberals). But, barring something like a natural disaster, they believe that government is not the best and certainly not the first resort for acting on one's compassion. I still believe all of that, probably even more than I did when Bush was in office. But, as a political matter, it has become clear that he was on to something important. Neither critics nor supporters of compassionate conservatism could come to a consensus over the question of whether it was a mushy-gushy marketing slogan (a Republican version of Some sophisticated analysts, such as my Compassionate conservatism increasingly faded from view after 9/11. Bush ran as a war president first and a compassionate conservative at best second in 2004. Still, it's worth remembering that Bush won a staggering (for a Republican) 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Romney got 27 percent. Moreover, according to exit polls, Romney decisively beat Obama on the questions of leadership, values and economic expertise, but was crushed by more than 60 points on the question of which candidate "cares about people like me." I still don't like compassionate conservatism or its conception of the role of government. But given the election results, I have to acknowledge that Bush was more prescient than I appreciated at the time.
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