Dinosaur on Bastille Day

[Photo: The author, riding around Stone Mountain Park, GA, happened upon the park's "Dinosaureum."]

On July 14th, Bastille Day, I think of words about the French Revolution by a man of the time, Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish parliamentarian who supported American independence.  He was spiritual patriarch of conservatism as I knew it, before I became the dinosaur that I am today.

Responding in the early 1790s to the Terror that quickly emerged from the euphoric chaos of Bastille Day, Burke told how he'd met the charming Marie Antoinette in her youth.  He deplored the revolutionary mob's treatment of her: "The age of chivalry has passed; the age of economists and calculators has succeeded."  He added, "To them, a Queen is just a woman, and a woman is just an animal, an animal not of the highest sort."

When I unpack those words, I find all the elements of conservatism that I value.  Economic theories take a back seat to humanity. Burke would have us all be courteous to royalty and non-royalty alike, with special care for the defenseless. [See my 2015 reflection on Burke and Bastille, "Logic and Faith: How to Judge Value."]

Unlike "etiquette," formalities intended to distinguish upper-class from lower, "courtesy" is an attitude towards individuals, essential to conservatism as I learned it.  Courtesy on a societal scale is "justice", and its partner "rule of law" applies up and down the social scale, to prevent both tyranny of the elite and tyranny of the mob.

I trace my conservatism back to Burke.  I see it in Abraham Lincoln's insistence that, while minority rule is unthinkable, the rule of the majority must be limited by laws to protect the interests of the minority. Theodore Roosevelt was gung-ho bootstraps and laissez-faire until activist Jacob Riis showed him tenements crowded with hard-working immigrant families trapped in a system that amounted to a slavery, and TR worked ever-after for a "fair deal."  The figurehead for conservatism in my first forty years was National Review's creator and editor-in-chief William F. Buckley, who counted arch-liberals among his close friends. (The Buckleys and the Ted Kennedys shared a ski vacation every winter.)

Early in the Reagan years, George F. Will wrote a book-length essay Statecraft as Soulcraft to lay out a conservative vision of a state that actively models, ensures, and inculcates the values that must be shared for democracy to work.  My list of those conservative values would include courtesy, openness to information and ideas, and  respect for prescribed legal and political processes even when the results don't go our way.  My list would not include tax - cuts - no - matter - the - situation,  or demonization of foreigners, the Media, or the other party.  This makes me a conservative dinosaur.

I'm not alone. In the past couple of years, prominent conservatives besides George Will, including members of Congress, have expressed alienation from the party they thought they belonged to.  Among these are historian Max Boot, Republican strategist Steven Schmidt, speechwriter and head of George W. Bush's faith initiative Michael Gerson, former evangelical activist Rob Schenck, and Bill Kristol, longtime editor at the National Review after Buckley.  

Like the dinosaurs, we're looking at a world we don't recognize.  Also like the dinosaurs, we have to admit that  the change has been a long time coming.  [I wrote about these feelings in 2013: Civics Lesson for Republicans]   Gerson's 2007 book Heroic Conservatism carries the subtitle "Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't)."  He didn't anticipate that the party's continuing to reject those ideals would result in electoral success, but he wasn't writing just about elections.

David Frum, another speechwriter for George W. Bush, saw the ground shifting under him in 2011:

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

Frum compares "conservatives" at the time of his article to those of just a few years before:

• While Bush defended the "earned-income tax credit" from attempts to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor," members of his own party called low wage earners "lucky ducks" for not owing Federal taxes.
• Bush "routinely invoked 'churches, synagogues, and mosques'" but in 2010 members of his party called it "an outrageous insult" to build a mosque near Ground Zero  
• Conservatives attacked the Affordable Care Act, though it was modeled on a public - and - private health care plan proposed by Republicans in the Senate to be a conservative alternative to Clinton's proposal.
• "Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is 'socialism.' In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program."

Frum concludes: "I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess."

As dinosaurs, what are our choices?  One option is off the table, for me: the discourteous personal attacks on public officials going about their private lives at restaurants and movie theatres.

Historian Jon Meacham has written a book that may contain some answers.  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels collects episodes from our history when, as now, the discourse degenerated.  He cautioned in an interview that his message was not, "We've been here before, so you don't have to worry," but, "We've been here before, and here's how we've gotten out of it before."

Okay, I'm ready to read.