Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Conservative Surrender

(Reprinted from the issue of May 27, 2004)

New Time and Newsweek polls find public approval for President Bush at its lowest level ever, with only about 35% now approving his handling of the Iraq war. Even his conservative support is beginning to slip, as it sinks in that Bush is, except in his rhetoric, anything but a conservative.

Why have conservatives taken so long to realize this? Chiefly, I suppose, because Bush is a winner who antagonizes liberals. But there is more to conservatism than offending the other side. Bush has not only expanded the power of government and driven enormous spending increases; he has also intensified the concentration of power in the executive branch.

True, the Republican Congress has gone along with this — a case of the “our guy” syndrome of partisan politics, in which otherwise arrogant power-grabs are forgiven when “our guy” performs them. Sen. John Warner, a “moderate” Virginia Republican, feels compelled to remind Bush that Congress is a “coequal” branch of the federal government.

Do tell! Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is supposed to be more than equal, holding as it does the powers of the purse and impeachment as well as all legislative power. And it’s the branch that represents the people and the states; the president is an executive, not a representative, being elected not by the people en masse but, in theory at least, by the electoral college.

This all began to change when Lincoln, the first Republican president (and the first with a Republican Congress), usurped vast powers in order to wage war on the Confederacy. Times of war and crisis are always favorable to usurpation. Lincoln acted boldly, but not always certainly: He doubted his authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which he justified as a measure to suppress “insurrection.” Contrary to popular belief, that didn’t “abolish slavery”; it only declared the freedom of slaves in the Confederacy (but not in Union slave states), where it could not be enforced at the time.

Yet to hear people talk nowadays, you would think that any president could have abolished slavery at any time with a stroke of the pen. That shows how many Americans imagine the president to be a sort of elected dictator. And most of them see nothing very wrong with this.

The amassing of power in the executive branch took great strides under Woodrow Wilson and his disciple Franklin Roosevelt. Both were war presidents, but Roosevelt did most of his mischief before World War II, under color of battling the Great Depression. New federal bureaucracies were created, and legislative powers were (unconstitutionally) delegated to them. By 1940 H.L. Mencken could observe that the sheer number of government activities had outrun the ability of the press to cover them or of the public to keep track of them. Executive rule was displacing representative government. The original separation (and limitation) of powers was quietly abolished, this time by a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress.
 
Waning Resistance

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, made his own contribution to this process. By launching a war (he called it a “police action”) on North Korea, he did something even Roosevelt hadn’t dared to do after Pearl Harbor: He usurped one of Congress’s essential powers, the power to declare war. The Founders had assigned this power to Congress because they had dreaded, above almost all things, leaving the decision to a single man.

Truman also attempted other breathtaking usurpations, such as seizing the country’s steel mills and even drafting striking government workers into the armed forces. Fortunately, these failed; but his expansion of presidential war-making powers has become a precedent for his successors.

Truman’s usurpations were opposed by some (by no means all) Republicans, and chiefly by “Mr. Republican” himself: Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. Conservatives in those days still had qualms about executive “Caesarism.” But as the Democrats came to dominate both houses of Congress over the next generation, resistance waned.

With a Democratic Congress a given, Republicans, including most conservatives, began to place their hopes in the presidency, which they still had hopes of winning. They weren’t entirely happy with Richard Nixon, who was elected in 1968, but executive powers were now a useful tool against liberal Democrats and the temptation was too strong for all but the most principled conservatives, especially during the Vietnam War most of them supported. By the time Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the Cold War still raging, conservatives wholeheartedly (but shortsightedly) favored the “imperial” presidency liberals had come to distrust. Reagan’s personal popularity presented an irresistible opportunity.

So it went when the first President Bush made undeclared wars on Panama and Iraq. Conservatives, now joined by neoconservatives who had kept their big government instincts from the days of Roosevelt, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson, fought against all congressional attempts to limit executive powers. Conservatives didn’t revert to their old position even during the Clinton years, when they faced the unfamiliar situation of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress.
 
Vast New Executive Powers

Today we have another novel situation: a Republican president with a Republican Congress — a mirror image of the Johnson years. It should have been a golden opportunity to move back toward constitutional government, and at first the new Bush seemed to encourage such hopes. But he soon showed that he had only a weak and erratic conception of limited government, and he was ready to compromise even that for political advantage.

Then came 9/11. The ensuing war fever endowed Bush with a personal charisma he had never enjoyed before and also gave him the chance to claim vast new executive powers, including a new, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Nearly everyone succumbed to the spirit of the moment, including Democrats who would normally oppose him and conservatives who should have known better.

Now, as so often happens, a development that would have horrified our ancestors has come to be taken for granted on all sides. Even their liberal enemies don’t accuse conservatives of forgetting their principles; which means that the great majority of conservatives have, like Bush, accepted liberal principles.

At least when Reagan strayed from the faith, conservatives complained, saying, “Let Reagan be Reagan” and blaming “the men around the president” for his lapses. They assumed that there was a “real Reagan” who knew better.

But nobody assumes that Bush knows better; nobody demands, “Let Bush be Bush,” or argues that his lapses are due to the mischief of squishy “moderates” around him. But rather than criticize him on their once-cherished principles, most conservatives have been willing to forget those principles and pretend that Bush is their godsend.

At least this has been the case until now. But Bush no longer looks like a sure winner; those polls show him trailing John Kerry, and the Iraq war may already be an irretrievable failure. Conservatives may yet pay dearly for embracing him, and may also bitterly repent the compromises that have allowed the neoconservatives to dominate their movement.


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Joseph Sobran