Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

McCain and the Neo-Cons-Revised and Extended

Before we all decide to roll over and play dead as the John McCain train leaves the station (boy those are some mixed metaphors), let’s pause to revisit a May 2000 First Things essay by James Nuechterlein, which reminds us of the enthusiam certain neo-cons had for McCain back then. Nuechterlein focused on “ piece coauthored by William Kristol and David Brooks at the height of the McCain campaign, ‘The Politics of Creative Destruction’”:

Kristol and Brooks, borrowing from the economist Joseph Schumpeter, adapt his summary of the paradoxical genius of capitalism to current political realities. Conservatism in general, and the GOP in particular, they say, is in need of creative destruction because of its current parlous condition. Conservatives have lost the political initiative to Bill Clinton’s reconfigured centrist liberalism, and McCain’s challenge to the Republican establishment offers the right the way to regain the political high ground.

In the first place, Kristol and Brooks argue, McCain would disenthrall the right of its excessively antigovernment bias: “McCain doesn’t say that govern ment is oppressive and just needs to get out of the way. He says he wants to reform government to make us proud.” Second, and more to the point of Foer’s argument, McCain “would redirect a religiously based moral conservatism into a patriotically grounded moral appeal.” “When McCain talks about remoralizing America,” Kristol and Brooks go on, “he ends up talking about patriotism. . . . This conflation of religion and patriotism is very much in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and, for that matter, Ronald Reagan.” The new religion of patriotism, Kristol and Brooks conclude, would, without antagonizing grassroots moral conservatives, appeal to independents leery of Robertson and Falwell’s Christian zealotry and form “the heart of a new conservative governing majority.”

The argument is an ingenious one. It is also, in my view, mischievous, misguided, and finally dangerous. Take, for starters, the curious linking of Roosevelt and Reagan, a linking as habitually indulged in by McCain as by Kristol and Brooks. Both TR and Reagan, it is true, were instinctive and passionate patriots. Both, too, were brilliant, even charismatic leaders-blessed, most of the time, with what a Roosevelt biographer called “a perfect sense of political pitch.”

But that’s about it for similarities. TR had an innocent faith in an activist federal government. As H. L. Mencken said, “He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” The New Nationalism he put forward in his quixotic Bull Moose campaign for the presidency in 1912, with its sweeping program of federal regulation of the economy and guarantees for social welfare, set the blueprint for the big government crusades of Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

Reagan, of course, was just the opposite. Contra the Weekly Standard and its recurring, if vague, invocation of “national-greatness conservatism,” he did believe that, foreign policy aside, government should “just get out of the way.” His conception of national greatness rested on faith in the creative energies of the American people rather than in their government. His favorite Republican presidential predecessor, it should be remembered, was not TR but Calvin Coolidge. And even in foreign policy, his program was not the wholesale interventionism that TR sometimes inclined to and that the Weekly Standard appears to favor.

But it is Kristol and Brooks’ “conflation of religion and patriotism” that is most troubling. Reagan, it must be conceded, flirted with it in his biblically informed vision of America as a “city on a hill” providentially established by God as example to the nations. The Puritans liked to invoke that image, but they meant it more in theological than political terms. Reagan, so far as I can tell, simply meant it to convey the idea that the American experiment, however conceived, was a very good thing indeed.

TR, at his worst, did make a religion of patriotism, and it provided the ugliest chapter in his career. His ferocious jingoism during World War I-"He who is not with us, absolutely and without reserve of any kind, is against us, and should be treated as an alien enemy"-stands as an embarrassment for all of us who revere his memory and admire his undoubted, if flawed, greatness. The very concept of a religion of patriotism is an invitation to idolatry. America is properly loved only by those who keep their loves in proper order, who love their nation only in subordination to their transcendent loves.

John McCain claims to be a loyal foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, but Nuechterlein’s right. McCain has a lot more in common with TR and Bill Kristol than Ronald Reagan. And that’s damned scary. Why? If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness “conservatism” of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-"conservatism" of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home, as I’ve complained in more detail elsewhere. Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism. We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold, but in a sense those are tactical issues. Here is where, in my opinion, McCain fundamentally goes off the reservation. After all, as Russell Kirk wrote:

Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? ... In short, deliberate entry into war commonly brings on consequences disagreeable even to the seeming victors. Prudent statesmen long have known that armed conflict, for all involved, ought to be the last desperate resort, to be entered upon only when all means of diplomacy, conciliation, and compromise have been exhausted.

Query whether Teddy Roosevelt or Bill Kristol would ascribe to those principles?

In any case, let us turn to well-known religious blogger John Mark Reynolds, who has raised concerns about McCain somewhat similar to those raised here. Indeed, Reynolds is quite blunt:

John McCain is using patriotic boilerplate that goes equally too far in a statist direction. He sounds like we should worship our nation.

Reynolds continues:

Of late McCain has made patriotic statements that lack any sense of proportion and give to the state language that traditional Western man reserves for God.

Here is a troubling passage from his New Hampshire acceptance speech:

So, my friends, we celebrate one victory tonight and leave for Michigan tomorrow to win another. But let us remember that our purpose is not ours alone; our success is not an end in itself. America is our cause — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Her greatness is our hope; her strength is our protection; her ideals our greatest treasure; her prosperity the promise we keep to our children; her goodness the hope of mankind. That is the cause of our campaign and the platform of my party, and I will stay true to it so help me God.

Well, no.

America is not our ultimate cause. Western ideals and cultural treasures are not her exclusive property, as friends in Britain and Rome would point out. America’s “goodness,” which is often dubious, is not the ultimate hope of mankind, thank God. Our rights comes from God and not the state, not even America, and are ultimately protected by Almighty God and not the Constitution of 1789.

To be clear, I stand with Lincoln in believing that America is the last best hope of Earth and with Ronald Reagan in believing it appropriate to use quasi-religious language in calling America a “shining city on a hill.” Indeed, as Reynolds himself observes:

All of the things McCain says could be qualified just a fraction to be true or at least arguably true. They have been said by others, from Lincoln to Reagan, in more subtle ways that made them unobjectionable.

Yet, it seems fair to ask, as Reynolds does that:

Is America McCain’s god?