Climb the Highest Mountain?

Climb by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

            May 09, 2009, 7:00 a.m.

            Climb
            Conservatives must have the courage to defend their convictions.

            By Mark Steyn

            Is conservatism over?

            Well, of course it is. Everyone from James Carville to Colin Powell
            says so. “The Republican party is in deep trouble,” General Powell
            told some group willing to pay him serious money to deliver this
            kind of incisive insight. “Americans do want to pay taxes for
            services. Americans want more government in their lives, not less.”

            Whether or not they want it, they’re certainly going to get it. And
            if you like big government now, just think how big it’ll be once
            both parties are fully signed up to the concept. You’ll recall that
            General Powell voted for Barack Obama, coming out and publicly
            stiffing his “beloved friend” John McCain, after years of more
            discreetly stiffing (in leaks to Bob Woodward and others) his
            not-so-beloved colleagues in the Bush administration. But, in
            fairness to the former secretary of state, his breezy endorsement of
            more government and more taxes is as near as we’ve ever got to a
            coherent political philosophy from him. If the GOP refuses to take
            his advice, I would urge him to run a third-party campaign on this
            refreshingly candid platform.

            One of Powell’s more famous utterances was his rationale, after the
            1991 Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the
            Balkans: “We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.” Actually, by that
            stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush’s
            decision, at Powell’s urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the
            coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message
            about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day.
            As for the Kurds and Shiites to whom it never occurred that the
            world’s superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purpose
            of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly
            took a bloody revenge: That’s an interesting glimpse of what it’s
            like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell’s much-vaunted
            “moderation.”

            So I have no great regard for Powell’s strategic thinking, at home
            or abroad. As the general sees it, the Republican party ought to be
            a “big tent”: Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few “mean
            spirited” and “divisive” talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live
            kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the
            Democrat tent, they’ve got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben
            Affleck: diversity on parade.

            In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives,
            libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These
            groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’
            insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get
            the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist
            hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so
            hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a
            time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various
            poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006
            electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a
            war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless, half-hearted,
            semi-colonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly.
            The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage:
            There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism
            and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of
            electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in
            office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or
            unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

            Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with
            ruthless singlemindedness: In the Democrats’ parade, whatever your
            bugbear, government is the answer. Government is the means,
            government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives
            them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

            And yet and yet . . . Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal
            profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,”
            even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any
            rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent
            thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal
            character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a
            charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even
            facing the natural cycle of a two-party system, the washed-up loser
            no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

            Okay, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big
            transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it were.

            To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican
            party is in the desert, when in fact it’s climbing a mountain. All
            things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of
            the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It’s
            up against significant members of its own party. It’s up against
            media for whom the Democrats’ positions are the default positions on
            almost anything that matters.

            Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in
            the New York Times back in 2002: “Mr. Powell’s approach to almost
            all issues — foreign or domestic — is pragmatic and nonideological.
            He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has
            supported abortion rights and affirmative action.”

            So supporting “internationalism,” “multilateralism,” abortion, and
            racial quotas means you’re “moderate” and “nonideological”? And
            anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely.
            The aim of a large swathe of the Left is not to win the debate but
            to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number
            of ways: busting up campus appearances by conservatives, “hate
            speech” prohibitions, activist judges’ more imaginative court
            decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of
            every issue to be the “moderate” and “nonideological” position —
            even when, in many cases, the “extreme” position is supported by a
            majority of voters. Likewise, to Colin Powell, it’s Ann Coulter
            who’s “vicious,” not Michael Moore, who compares the jihadists who
            blow up Western troops in Iraq to America’s Minutemen and gets
            rewarded with a seat next to Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at
            the Democratic convention.

            It’s a mountain, and it’s getting steeper. Promises of “free”
            government health care will make more voters susceptible to the
            blandishments of the nanny state. The Democrats have plans for talk
            radio and the Internet that will diminish conservative voices.
            Another retirement on the Supreme Court, and the First and Second
            Amendments will start getting nibbled away. Obama’s buddies at
            ACORN, already under investigation in multiple states over
            fraudulent voter registration, will have a prominent say in the 2010
            census.

            But, when the going gets tough, you don’t, as General Powell
            advises, “move toward the center.” You move the center toward you,
            as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did. It’s harder to do it
            that way, but if it’s a choice between more government and more
            taxes, or more liberty and more opportunity, I’ll stick with the
            latter, and so should the Republican party — however difficult it
            is. Unlike Colin Powell, conservatism does do mountains.

            — Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America
            Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn

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