Have GOP Failures Destroyed “True Conservatism?”

Ezra Klein says that we ought to ignore conservatives who respond to GOP failures by arguing that "true conservatism" (or libertarianism, if that’s your thing) hasn’t bee tried yet in the same way that we ignore Marxists who still defend it by saying that "true Marxism hasn’t been tried yet."

…just about every time something called Marxism was tried, it traveled down much the same course, and failed in much the same way. Which is what you should be passing judgment on. Similarly, conservatism isn’t ending up in this mess by accident… In essence, that set of policies is what conservatism becomes in office. And so it’s the set that should be evaluated.

This is a pretty clever argument, and I’ll forgive him the subtle comparison to Marxism, if only because our side isn’t immune to deploying that sort of rhetoric either.

But I’m not sure Ezra really buys the line himself. If, for example, we end up with a few election cycles in which Democrats hold majorities in Congress and the White House (quite likely, I think) and their domestic policy agenda gets stymied by whatever unexpected events (catastrophic storms, wars, terrorism, bizarre scandals) and/or Republican tactics on the floor, I doubt Ezra, true believer in good-government that he is, would give up on liberalism, or progressivism, or whatever label he likes to use for his political agenda.

The thing is, Ezra’s a policy wonk who likes to dig deep into the details of government policy, and I’m pretty sure he believes that good policy should be argued on its merits, not simply attached to a label and then dismissed.

And even if you accept his argument, it doesn’t really hurt those of us who’ve been arguing for a "true conservative" agenda. It’s easy to say — and in fact, I often do — that if conservatism is defined by the sort of incompetence, overspending, and mismanagement that have been so common during the last couple of years, then I’m not a conservative, or at least not a conservative in the current sense. (I do like to think that conservatism is something that reaches back a little further than the last few election cycles.) Dissociating oneself and one’s ideas from the mistakes, muddle, and compromise of day-to-day politics isn’t all that difficult.

In that vein, Ezra also asks what policy successes conservatives point to these days:

What’s the recent, conservative, domestic idea that right-leaning folks can point to proudly? The closest I can come is No Child Left Behind, which has some worth (though does need reform) — but massively expanding federal oversight over public education isn’t a very conservative thought, and the bill was crafted by Ted Kennedy. I know the Right is proud of welfare reform, but what’s the successor?

Well, I’m no fan of No Child Left Behind (and I doubt you’ll find many serious small-government types who are), but I suspect a lot of people on the right would point to the Bush tax cuts as the biggest success of the last few years. Sure, supply-side rhetoric about tax cuts "paying for themselves" is sometimes overblown, but one needn’t believe that line to make the argument that they have stimulated the economy (albeit without the sort of redistribution Ezra would like to see). And, even beyond that, one can simply take the Milton Friedman line that there’s a very straightforward moral argument for tax cuts. Ezra and his fellow liberals might not like them, and lower taxes might not be the burning political issue in 2008, but there are good reasons for conservatives to champion the cuts.