Common Cause?

A quick quiz -- in what publication did the following statement appear?

The biggest problem is Bush himself, who—though a decent person who might make a good neighbor—suffers from unbridled hubris. His absolute certainty appears to be matched only by his extraordinary ignorance. His refusal to reconsider his own decisions and hold his officials accountable for obvious errors have proved to be a combustible combination.

(a) Mother Jones
(b) The New Yorker
(c) The American Conservative
(d) The New York Review of Books
(e) Tikkun

10 points to those of you who guessed (c). The quote is from Douglas Bandow's review of Bruce Bartlett's book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (Doubleday 2006). [link] The review is interesting, in part because it reads like something that a frustrated Democrat could have written, and in part because it was written and published by "true" conservatives.

It isn't exactly news that true conservatives, led by Pat Buchanan, among others, have come to dislike President Bush. To quote Bandow's review,

Five years later, the traditional conservative agenda lies in ruins. Government is bigger, spending is higher, and Washington is more powerful. The national government has intruded further into state and local concerns. Federal officials have sacrificed civil liberties and constitutional rights while airily demanding that the public trust them not to abuse their power.

The U.S. has engaged in aggressive war to promote democracy and undertaken an expensive foreign-aid program. The administration and its supporters routinely denounce critics as partisans and even traitors. Indeed, the White House defenestrates anyone who acknowledges that reality sometimes conflicts with official fantasies.

In short, it is precisely the sort of government that conservatives once feared would result from liberal control in Washington.

To me, it seems like this is a watershed moment -- when the intellectual base takes to comparing its leadership to the pigs in Animal Farm, it seems to me that the disaffection is potent. And potent disdain is a catalyst for change.

So now for the $64,000 question: can liberals make common cause with disaffected conservatives? Perhaps we can, if we start small and build.

On some issues, I think we can all agree: we all disdain the neocon fantasies of nation-building in the Middle East. and therefore, surely we could make common cause on that issue.

On other issues, the goal should be to show them that regardless of why, we want the same ends, and therefore we can make common cause there, too. Thus, on civil liberties, for example let us stop trying to convince them of our rightness, and instead, sell them on pragmatism. In other words, pitch to conservatives that a vote for the Democrats will ensure a rolling back of government intrusions that offend them and us. Or take No Child Left Behind (please). Democrats dislike the law because it forces schools to make pedagogically questionable decisions in an effort to comply in a time of chronically short budgets. Conservatives ought to dislike it because it extends the federal government into an arena that has historically been the province of local government. Surely we could fashion kind of mutually agreeable compromise?

Finally, on some issues, we should contemplate how we can preserve our values, but consider compromising on what that means. Here, I am talking about big government:: in theory, Democrats ought to get behind the idea that government should do primarily the things that the private sector cannot do efficiently, and should be comfortable with the notion that there are some areas where the government could stand down. President Clinton and Vice President Gore made "reinventing government" a touchstone of that adminstration; surely, we could come up with some smaller government initiatives that we can all agree on?

They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Perhaps the time is right for both sides to stop insisting on ideological purity, and see what we can do together. It seems to me that the stars are strangely aligned for a strategic understanding between moderate Democrats and true conservatives, which might come with substantial electoral support from both sides.

If you can't be with one you love, honey, love the one your with...