Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Open Conspiracy

(Reprinted from the issue of February 5, 2004)

A Massachusetts liberal for president? With John Kerry the clear Democratic front-runner now, it’s a live possibility. He whipped Howard Dean easily in the New Hampshire primary, where Dean was supposed to make, and may in fact have made, his strongest showing. Democrats who feared that George Bush would crush Dean are now rallying to Kerry just because he’s the front-runner.

New Hampshire probably effectively ended the presidential hopes of Gen. Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman. John Edwards, who finished a surprising second in the Iowa caucuses a week earlier, also finished poorly.

How well will Kerry wear across the country over a long campaign? Not very, I think. He’s widely regarded as an off-putting Brahmin, arrogant and pompous. And he may be peaking too soon. An assembly-line liberal, he’s unlikely to generate lasting enthusiasm. But he topped Bush in a recent Newsweek poll, 49% to 46%, so the president can no longer assume the November election is his to lose.

Bush may have peaked too early too. His popularity reached its height last year, in the flush of victory over Iraq. Sound familiar? It’s family history. His father enjoyed terrific poll ratings after defeating Iraq in 1991. Then came 1992 ...

Bush may be repeating his father’s pattern in another respect: He’s angering his base. Conservative fury at his big-spending ways was evident at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Alexandria, Va., just across the Potomac from Washington. And 23 Republican congressmen have just written a letter warning Bush that their GOP constituents are so angry at his guest-worker proposal that they may sit out this year’s election.

I popped into the CPAC gathering briefly and asked two youngsters at a pro-Bush booth in what way Bush is conservative. They gave me a baffled look. Others were quoted as complaining that Bush treats conservatives with contempt.

Wartime popularity is notoriously short-lived. The very ease of both Bushes’ victories over Iraq proved that there was no Iraqi threat to this country in the first place, and the incumbent Bush is backing away from his obsessive insistence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” a charge now discredited even by David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

Not long ago the administration was accused of manipulating the intelligence services in order to provide a false justification for war. Now the White House is saying that those services misled Bush! Either way, Bush doesn’t look good. Yet he continues to insist that the war was somehow justified. It’s an awkward defensive posture, and one thing a president doesn’t need during an election year is growing skepticism about whether his word can be trusted.

In contrast to both Dean and Bush, Kerry is a steady performer who doesn’t commit many gaffes. Republicans are already scrambling through his record looking for damaging statements, but they aren’t coming up with much. He’s smart enough to take full advantage of Bush’s vulnerabilities and neutralize his strengths. Bush, on the other hand, is in no position to paint Kerry as either a peacenik or a big-spending liberal.

If Kerry doesn’t inspire much passion, Bush does. But it’s the wrong kind. The voters most likely to turn out in November are those who want to throw him out of the White House.

And why should conservatives fear that? With Bush gone and replaced by a Democratic president, the Republican Party might start opposing the expansion of government again. Of course a Kerry victory might also bring a shift of power in Congress, restoring a Democratic majority, at least in the House of Representatives. But neither party would have a clear monopoly of power.

Bush has been our first neoconservative president — eager for war in the Mideast, indifferent to social issues, reconciled to the growth of federal power, unconcerned about federal spending. He is barely to the right of Kerry, except perhaps on same-sex marriage.

What would they really have to debate about? To borrow Bill Buckley’s great line, it would be like the Smith Brothers debating on cough drops.

Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the neocon bulletin board, actually celebrates Bush as a “big-government conservative.” There you have it — though it might be more accurate to say “a big-government man who wants to be called a conservative.” One would think big-government conservatism is a contradiction in terms; unless Barnes means that Bush is conserving big government, in which case he certainly has a point. After Bush, it may be vain to hope for limited, constitutional government.
 
Petty Tyranny

As long ago as the 1930s, H.G. Wells prophesied “the Open Conspiracy” — by which he meant an international tendency toward a one-world bureaucratic regime, which he already (approvingly) saw taking shape. Communists, socialists, liberals, and other “progressives” around the globe were all working toward the new order Wells foresaw; maybe he wouldn’t be surprised to find self-styled conservatives, in time, joining the irresistible movement too.

I never tire of quoting Chesterton: “Men can always be blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough.” And the thing men in our time seem most blind to is simply the astounding growth of the state — not only in its enormous scale, not only in its “totalitarian” extremes of horror and cruelty, but simply in its penetration of all the details of life. It isn’t Hiroshima or the Gulag that brings this home to me, but the irritating legal restrictions I encounter when attempting something as simple as having my dog groomed.

It’s the sort of petty tyranny Tocqueville predicted, but on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. Yet we take it all for granted.

I marvel that this change from traditional government to the all-encompassing state has hardly been noticed. A transformation as profound as the Industrial Revolution (which helped make it possible) still has no handy, recognizable name. Good or bad, it’s certainly a historical fact of the first magnitude.

And if it’s bad, we can’t expect politicians to do anything to correct it. After all, going with the flow is their way of life. So naturally there isn’t much to choose between a Bush and a Kerry. One party wants the state to move this way; the other wants it to go in another direction. But both want to keep it basically as it is.

The problem won’t be solved until it’s properly defined; and it won’t be defined until people recognize it as a problem. Unfortunately, few of us do recognize it as such. Fewer and fewer are old enough to remember living under any other regime; and the young are taught that the era of relative freedom was a Dark Age. The Open Conspiracy has succeeded.


Every month I try to define the problem more sharply, while finding a few amusing angles, in my monthly newsletter, SOBRAN’S. If you have not seen it yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website. Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran