November 17, 2005
Conservative Coalition Falters
By George
Will
WASHINGTON -- The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party
should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where
all eight members of the school board seeking re-election were
defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation
with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise
of ``intelligent design'' theory, into high school biology classes,
beginning with a required proclamation that evolution ``is not
a fact.''
But it is. And President Bush's straddle on that subject -- ``both
sides'' should be taught -- although intended to be anodyne, probably
was inflammatory, emboldening social conservatives. Dover's insurrection
occurred as Kansas' Board of Education, which is controlled by
the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate
people, voted 6-4 to redefine science. The board, opening the
way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the definition
of science these words: ``a search for natural explanations of
observable phenomena.''
``It does me no injury,'' said Thomas Jefferson, ``for my neighbor
to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket
nor breaks my leg.'' But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when
zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific
education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued
for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government
conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling
to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies
on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and
government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian
crusades.
But, then, the limited-government impulse is a spent force in
a Republican Party that cannot muster congressional majorities
to cut the growth of Medicaid from 7.3 percent to 7 percent
next year. That ``cut'' was too draconian for some Republican
``moderates.'' But, then, most Republicans are moderates
as that term is used by persons for whom it is an encomium: Moderates
are people amiably untroubled by Washington's single-minded devotion
to rent-seeking -- to bending government for the advantage of
private factions.
Conservatives have won seven of 10 presidential elections, yet
government waxes, with per household federal spending more than
$22,000 per year, the highest in inflation-adjusted terms since
World War II. Federal spending -- including a 100 percent increase
in education spending since 2001 -- has grown twice as fast under
President Bush as under President Clinton, 65 percent of it unrelated
to national security.
In 1991, the 546 pork projects in the 13 appropriation bills cost
$3.1 billion. In 2005, the 13,997 pork projects cost $27.3 billion
for things like improving the National Packard Museum in Warren,
Ohio (Packard, an automobile brand, died in 1958).
Washington subsidizes the cost of water to encourage farmers to
produce surpluses that trigger a gusher of government spending
to support prices. It is almost comforting that $2 billion is
spent each year paying farmers not to produce. Farm subsidies,
most of which go to agribusinesses and affluent farmers, are just
part of the $60 billion in corporate welfare that dwarfs the $29
billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security.
Brian Riedl of The Heritage Foundation reports that Congress responded
to the Korean War by setting priorities, cutting one-fourth of
all nonwar spending in one year. Recently the House failed
to approve an unusually ambitious effort to cut government growth.
This is today's ambitiousness: attempting -- probably unsuccessfully
-- to cut government growth by $54 billion over five years.
That is $10.8 billion a year from five budgets projected to total
$12.5 trillion, of which $54 billion is four-tenths of 1 percent.
War is hell but, on the home front, it is indistinguishable from
peace, except that the government is more undisciplined than ever.
Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia wonders whether
conservatives' cohesion is perishing because it was a product
of the period when conservatives were insurgents against dominant
liberals. About limited-government conservatism, he says:
``Perhaps conservatives were naive to expect any party, ever,
to resist rent-seeking temptations when in power. Just as there
always was something fatally unserious about socialism -- its
flawed understanding of human nature -- is it possible that there
has also been something profoundly unserious about the limited-government
agenda? Should we now be prepared for the national electoral wing
of the conservative movement -- the House and Senate caucuses
and executive branch officials -- to identify with legislation
like the pork-laden energy and transportation bills, in the same
way that liberals came to ground their identities in programs
like Social Security?''
Perhaps. But if so, limited-government conservatives will disassociate
from a Republican Party more congenial to overreaching social
conservatives. Then those Republican congressional caucuses will
be smaller, and Republican control of the executive branch will
be rarer.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
