Everybody vs. Gerson

It’s official: despite his claims to the contrary, Michael Gerson’s conservatism doesn’t fly.

The reviews of Gerson’s new book, Heroic Conservatism, are in, and from every side, he’s being lambasted.

Here’s George Will writing in the Washington Post, where Gerson has a column:

 Gerson, an evangelical Christian, makes “compassion” the defining attribute of political heroism. But compassion is a personal feeling, not a public agenda. To act compassionately is to act to prevent or ameliorate pain and distress. But if there is, as Gerson suggests, a categorical imperative to do so, two things follow. First, politics is reduced to right-mindedness — to having good intentions arising from noble sentiments — and has an attenuated connection with results. Second, limited government must be considered uncompassionate, because the ways to prevent or reduce stress are unlimited.

Gerson’s former White House speechwriting colleague, David Frum, writing in National Review, is scathing:

Americans are deeply compassionate people. But they are also deeply pragmatic people. They want results, not a politics of moral gestures. And all too often, moral gestures are all that the Bush administration [and, by proxy, Gerson] has offered.

And Ross Douthat, no small-government absolutist, writes in Slate that Gerson’s book offers:

… a stirring vision in its way, but there’s little that’s conservative about it. What Gerson proposes is an imitation of Great Society liberalism, in which noble, high-minded elites like himself use the levers of government on behalf of “the poor, the addicted, and children at risk.” He employs the phrase limited government here and there, but never suggests any concrete limits on what government should do. Whether he’s writing about poverty or foreign policy, immigration, or health care, his prescription for the right is all heroism and no conservatism; indeed, save for its pro-life sympathies, his vision seems indistinguishable from the liberalism of an LBJ—or a Jimmy Carter.

Indeed.  FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe offered up a his assessment of Gerson in NRO a few weeks back, and was similarly disturbed by what the former speechwriter is trying to pass off as conservatism.