Interesting attempt by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic to position McCain as a die-hard conservative. What of his apparent hatred of American business? His desire to soak the wealthy? What of his unthinking embrace of global warming hysteria? His radical (and utterly failed) attempts to control political speech and spending?

To come up with this interesting outcome, Rauch focuses on (and misunderstands) a single thread in the tapestry of American conservativism -- the influence of Edmund Burke and conservatives' aversion to "revolution":

Alert Washingtonians...

Such as our dear author, no doubt. Not like you rubes reading this blog...

... were treated to an odd juxtaposition not long ago. John McCain was booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the big annual gathering of the right-wing tribes, while trying to establish that he was a conservative. On the same day, across town at the American Enterprise Institute—another conservative stronghold—Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, was warmly received when he touted a new book called Real Change. Never one to go underboard, Ging­rich called for “explosively replac[ing] the failed bureaucracies of the past.” [....]

Burke is the father of modern conservatism, and still its wisest oracle. Tradition-minded but (contrary to stereotype) far from reactionary, he believed in balancing individual rights with social order. The best way to do that, for Burke, was by respecting long-standing customs and institutions while advancing toward liberty and equality. Society’s traditions, after all, embody an evolved collective wisdom that even (or especially) the smartest of individuals cannot hope to understand comprehensively, much less reinvent successfully.

Rauch's implication is essentially that Reagan wasn't a conservative because he believed in "revolution" -- a significant change. To be a conservative today, you have to leave our (rather liberal) order of things alone, not reform it too much. So Gingrich, because he wants a significantly smaller government, is a radical, a revolutionary, and not "conservative", whereas McCain, who whined about "tax breaks for the rich" -- we conservatives should suddenly believe he is one.

(And so, I guess the thinking would go, American conservatives should have supported hard-line Communists in the USSR because they would have preserved the status quo there, too.)

But Burke wasn't against all revolution. He was sympathetic to the American revolution, which was a radical break with a long tradition of monarchy. And he didn't only favor blind incrementalism -- he also favored personal liberty and limited government. And I doubt he would have felt that the modern welfare state should be preserved in the name of maintaining the status quo.

Rauch seems to have overlooked his own thesis:

Above all, [Burke] abhorred utopian reformers, who, by disdaining real-world constraints and overestimating their own intelligence, invariably worsen what they seek to improve.

When American conservatives want to overturn recent changes to government, we're not relying upon a high impression of our own intelligence, and we're certainly not disdaining real-world constraints. (To the contrary, they often compose the entire point of our arguments.) We almost always have an example in the past (and sometimes in the present -- looking to state governments), of how our alternative policies can work. Reagan cut taxes, for example, and the economy improved, and tax receipts increased. We also have mountains of evidence of the harmful impact of long-term welfare programs and fatherless families. Attempts to change such trends aren't based on wishful blank-slate utopian imaginings, but on hard lessons learned, hard evidence gathered.

The left wants a perfect world that never was, based on policies which have never worked, or have never been tried. The right is more than willing to accept even radical changes if it brings us back to a better state, or a situation which has been shown, by some well-documented present or past experiment (preferably several such experiments, or even centuries of history), to be useful or beneficial. There's more to conservativism than mere incrementalism. And undoing a radical leap is not the same thing as enacting one.

Consider educational vouchers: If "conservative" means what Rauch believes, conservatives should oppose any significant change to the status quo of union-dominated government schools. Yet vouchers and school choice have been tried in many places and times, to good effect. So we "conservatives" support the idea, despite the fact it would be a radical change. (Vouchers also imply more individual control, and smaller government, two other important aspects of US conservativism.)

Even more amusingly, Rauch attempts to portray the US welfare state (begun in LBJ's "Great Society" programs which only kicked in at the dawn of the 70s) as the equivalents of Burke's "long-standing customs and institutions" -- yet he refers to Reagan's programs (initiated just one decade later, yet still almost 30 years ago) as "new-fangled." Liberal programs apparently become longstanding traditions the moment they are enacted, but conservative ideas -- even if centuries old and the norm around the world -- are "radical" if they're not the norm here, just now.

Indeed, according to Rauch, this is precisely when American conservativism stopped being conservatism -- when it dared to oppose brand-new liberal changes, back in the 1960s.

If Burke were around today, he might paraphrase Reagan’s famous witticism about the Democratic Party: Burke didn’t leave the conservative movement; it left him. Starting with Barry Goldwater’s campaign of 1964, American conservatism repositioned itself as a revolutionary movement, intent on uprooting illegiti­mate and ineffective liberal structures.

How Orwellian can you get? It's not conservative to oppose radical policies once those polices have been enacted. We must then instantly become supporters of such, apparently -- never mind that they're still brand new. Too funny.

So Rauch's script for US politics goes like this: the Democrats, true their tradition, should proposal radical and untested reforms. Then, even when found to be "illegitimate and ineffective", conservatives should support and defend these new institutions and policies, since they're now the status quo. Next, the Democrats will propose still more radical, untested changes... and so on.

Reductio ad absurdum -- but also a liberal's dream. To say otherwise would be to betray Edmund Burke, right? Hilarious! The man who defended individual rights would now support the Stalinist old guard, once they seized control. This is, apparently, the kind of pithy insight readers of The Atlantic have come to expect.

Who, by the way, is this Jonathan Rauch guy, who is attempting to tell conservatives what their own beliefs should be? Is he an "expert" conservative? One of us? A long-time stalwart of the conservative movement, that he can dictate its terms to others within and without?

No, he is not. He is a proponent of gay marriage (which, right or wrong, is yet another one of those never-before-tested radical changes) and is a member of The Brookings Institution, a leftist think tank. My point is not that there's anything disreputable or dishonest about his views, but rather concerns the absurdity of his stance.

I love the kind of argument where some atheist opines on the real meaning of Christianity, and how their favored person or policy (generally leftist and secular) embodies it far more than some allegedly-Christian right-winger. (While making gross theological errors.) This is the political equivalent: "I, Rauch, being an 'alert Washingtonian', actually understand what conservativism means far more than these so-called conservatives -- Gingrich, Reagan, and most conservative voters."

In truth, I don't mind the outsider lecturing the insiders on their own values: but the outsider must be correct. It can be an effective move, if done right (or done before an audience who can't tell the difference -- as is surely the case here). But if you fail by overlooking something obvious, which insiders easily recognize, you end up looking both uninformed and arrogant.