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Wanted: A New Conservatism
  In
recent weeks Will has all but endorsed Rudy Giuliani (whom
else?) for president and ridiculed Ron Paul, who takes the U.S. Constitution
seriously, as an anachronism. I imagine he slapped his flippers together in
glee when Giuliani attacked Paul for saying the obvious, that the 9/11
attacks were motivated by American foreign policy, rather than by virginal
American innocence. Paul might have been speaking for Jefferson, Madison,
and Hamilton, men to whom Giuliani would have little to say, unless he could
say it with his middle finger.
Hence,
according to Will, conservatives thus should insist indeed that “the
argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over.” I
don’t know what he reads, but within the last hour (several hours
after I read that sentence!) I saw a review of a new book arguing that the
welfare state should be done away with. Hence, thus, and indeed my foot.
Where
does the Constitution authorize any such thing? How does Will square the
mammoth Federal welfare state with anything in The Federalist
Papers, where the Federal powers are said to be “few and
defined”? Well, Will has also declared the Tenth Amendment to be
“dead as a doornail,” so maybe anything written two centuries
ago is now defunct under the Living Document doctrine. Or is the whole
darned Constitution subject to some statute of limitations?
As long as
there are men like Will asserting that all is well with the present system,
there will be need of other men to contradict them. The word
conservative is vain unless you can define what most needs to be
conserved, because most things are bound to perish.
Case in
point: I have to move from my old house to a small apartment this week. I
own well over 10,000 books. I can fit about a fifth of them into my new
place. That means I face thousands of choices, many of them painful.
Conservatism is like that. You have to keep making hard
choices. That’s why I’m a little startled when anyone calling
himself a conservative starts by deciding that the Constitution, or any of its
key provisions, can be thrown out with the rubbish.
![[Breaker quote for Wanted: A New Conservatism: Or a really old one]](2007breakers/070531.gif) You
expect it of a party hack like
Giuliani, of whom it would be flattery to say that crassness is second nature
to him, when he manifestly knows no other. He calls killing children in the
womb a constitutional right. But George Will should know better. Has he
forgotten his own arguments?
The
truncated, perverted version of conservatism now called neoconservatism in
the media is “conservative” only in the sense that sodomy is
“sex.” The real thing can be found in the American Founders
and, in England, in the writings of such men as Samuel Johnson, Edmund
Burke, John Henry Newman, and What
American conservatism needs now can be summed up in a single word:
purification — an inward regeneration, without the slogans and
gimmicks of the last few decades — supply-side economics, term
limits, and all the other familiar but desperate substitutes for simple
principle. We are all bored and jaded with these by now.
The
change will have to come from young people who, without being zealots,
refuse to compromise as their elders have. We need a pacific patriotism that
doesn’t confuse war with “defense,” welfare with
“compassion,” or the sheer multiplicity of arbitrary (and even
criminal) powers with the rule of law. These are all lies that may be brushed
aside, and the sooner the better.
The old
conservatism has had its day, and it has failed as dismally as the old
liberalism. Even some of the old conservatives are finally starting to realize
that. As the Federal Government spends trillions of dollars per year, mostly
borrowed or virtually counterfeit, the compromises of the last few
generations are bound to buckle and collapse.
Start with
a simple question: How would honest Americans be worse off if the Federal
Government, in its present form, just ceased to exist?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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