Alan Wolfe: Why Conservatives Can't Govern

Alan Wolfe has an essay in The Washinton Monthly about the failure of modern right wing conservativism; here's some excerpts:

...This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's vindication only in the context of today's dismal performance.

About the only failure more pronounced than the president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP lawmakers--at least according to opinion polls, which in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the president's. This does not necessarily translate into electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-protection devices help protect against that. But even if many commentators think that Republicans may retain control over Congress, very few think they should.

Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. Libertarians such as Bruce Bartlett fret that under Republican control, government has not shrunk, as conservatives prescribe, but has grown. Insiders like Peggy Noonan complain that Republicans have become--well, insiders; they are too focused on retaining power and too disconnected from the base whose anger pushed them into power. Idealistic younger conservatives bewail the care and feeding of the K Street beast. Paleocons Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak blame neocons William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer for the debacle that is Iraq. Through all these laments there pulsates a sense of desperation....

(snip)

The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush's incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president's principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.

In Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog (that's part of The Washington Monthly), Alan Wolf has some more points to add to his essay:

...When Dick Cheney fought like the dickens to prevent anyone from knowing anything about his 2001 energy task force, you might have thought – I sure did – that he wanted to keep secret the names of the high rollers he invited. Maybe, though, he had another motive: given how bad conservatives have proven to be at governance, keeping their incompetence as secret as possible makes perfect sense.

Conservatives fail because those who hate government cannot run it very well – the theme of my recent article in the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly. But then there is also what can be called conservative management theory. Conservatives have strong ideas about how organizations ought to be run – and those ideas invariably make them run badly.

One such idea is that no information hostile to those in charge should ever leak out. The result, however, is that no good information ever leaks in. The smaller the number of decision-makers, the less the knowledge on which decisions are based. It is not good to keep a tight ship if the ship always sinks.

Wolfe makes a number of good points but we're still learning why Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have repeatedly failed the overwhelming majority of Americans when it comes to almost all of the responsibilities associated with their offices. I've been trying to understand the radical conservative movement but somehow, words like corruption, cronyism, incompetence and ideology still doesn't quite cover it. There's also a rage behind all this stuff that I truly don't understand. I've known good honest rational conservatives all my life and I'm bewildered by what has happened to our country. How did the lunatic fringe take over the Republican Party? And why did so many conventional Republicans, who ought to know better, sit and watch?

It would be a mistake for liberals and Democrats to think they're immune to whatever this political disease is that is destroying the Republican Party. I'm a liberal but maybe I'm becoming old-fashioned: I still believe in ideas like tolerance and the common good, and I believe it's important to understand history so we don't repeat it.