The end is near for our Golden Age of Republican Party rule.  The first blow came in 2006, when horrified voters kicked the GOP back to minority status in Congress.  And, come November, Republicans may emerge from elections without a veto-proof Senate and without one of their own demagogues occupying the White House.

If the party of limited government is to survive, warns Michael Gerson, it will have to ditch that whole “limited government” marketing brand.  Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan’s harsh rhetoric about “welfare queens”—all of that is an embarrassment.

Instead, the GOP needs to embrace “idealism,” both on the home front and abroad.  Promote social justice and expand government programs for the disadvantaged, the poor, the old, minorities, and immigrants.  Flex those foreign-policy muscles when it comes to bad people living in other parts of the world.  Build up the government for the common good—not our common good, but the world’s.  Do all this, but don’t do it as Democrats would—do it the Republican way, the compassionate-conservative way.

We haven’t heard much about compassionate conservatism since September 11, but it has been there all along, Gerson says, overshadowed by war.  It should be noted that Gerson served as a speechwriter for Bush; coincidentally, he has peppered his book with a generous and tedious sampling of those speeches.

Gerson isn’t one of those ex-White House staffers who pens a scathing indictment of his former boss.  He admires his President, because it was Bush who sought to drag the GOP into the future by “assaulting” the traditional elements of the conservative movement.  Gerson defends those efforts because they will save the GOP from oblivion—if only those stupid Republicans are smart enough to adopt them.

It is clear from the start that Gerson isn’t somebody you would invite to a Boston Tea Party.  The main villains in his political universe are fiscal conservatives who undermined compassionate conservatism either through indifference or outright hostility.  Fiscal conservatives—small-l libertarians and traditionalists—are the bogeymen lurking in his closet.  One minute, they are trying to snatch prescription drugs “from old people”; the next, they are kicking around the poor.

And this brings us to the main problem with Heroic Conservatism: With its reliance on broad generalizations and anecdotes, it simply isn’t a serious work.  The post-World War II conservative movement clawed its way to legitimacy by its serious, scholarly critiques of government: the tragedy of urban renewal, the disastrous impact of government subsidies on families and communities; the harebrained economic theories of the left; the rampant jackassery in public education, among many other subjects that conservative scholars methodically scrutinized.

Gerson doesn’t bother with those items.  He mainly calls it the way he sees it, in a tone that jumps from defensive to whiny to self-righteous.  Government, quite simply, is the answer to many of our social ills, if only we would fund it and put the right people in charge of pulling the levers.  Those people aren’t Democrats, mind you, but Republicans who can see beyond the left’s religious bigotry.  They can distribute taxpayer money to organizations—many of them religious—that will promote social justice and the public good.

This may sound an awful lot like modern liberalism, but Gerson insists it isn’t.  George W. Bush’s “guiding objective” was to reform government, “not to make it bigger or smaller, but more effective.”

Effective government?  One need only ponder Bush’s $46.3 billion Department of Homeland Security and its response to Hurricane Katrina to see effective government in action.

Two large-scale programs that meet with Gerson’s approval are the Medicare prescription-drug benefit and No Child Left Behind.  “Were it not for the Iraq war,” he writes, “these accomplishments would seem larger, because they are actually quite big.”

Prescription drugs may play well with the older set, but the new entitlement yokes future generations to massive unfunded liabilities.  I’m sure future generations will be thrilled to pay European-sized tax rates to keep the program afloat.  Public education, meanwhile, is just one area in the world of compassionate conservatism where the tentacles of the federal government should reach: “When smaller communities fall short or fail in serving the common good,” Gerson writes, “larger communities have a duty to intervene.”

How much money would it take to eradicate AIDS, station troops around the globe, and fund all the programs here and abroad that Gerson and his compassionate-conservative technocrats want?  Gerson doesn’t offer an answer.  Indeed, money is a sore spot for him.  By late 2005, Gerson said he was “increasingly frustrated by budgetary constraints that made creativity on the domestic agenda nearly impossible.”

Fiscal conservatives have teed off on Bush and the GOP Congress for their spending, and for good reason.  Gerson contends the “spending orgy” never happened.  Much of the increase in domestic spending was for Homeland Security, and he argues that such money shouldn’t be included in the category of domestic spending.  In practice, the department has become a pork-barrel express, spending billions so that local law and fire agencies can purchase equipment of dubious value to the nation’s security.  An armored personnel carrier for every rural sheriff’s department!

Much of the lavish spending that occurred in the Bush era was charged to the national VISA card.  The national debt is expected to be more than ten trillion dollars when Bush leaves office—double what it was when he entered.  The unfunded liabilities on entitlement programs approach ten times that amount.

Gerson, in his defense of the Bush White House, also neglects to address other issues.  Conservatives who gripe about Bush overlook his appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.  Yet Gerson fails to mention the Harriet Miers saga, in which a conservative revolt forced her withdrawal.  He maintains that conservatives have jumped on Bush for his fiscal transgressions, even though Ronald Reagan, who oversaw spending increases and deficits, is lionized.  That may be true, but Reagan never had the luxury of working with a Republican Congress.  Bush did, and the GOP went crazy with pork-barrel spending.  Mr. Bush kept his veto pen locked away when it came to spending bills, only to find it after Democrats marched into town.

Admittedly, Gerson’s dedication to alleviating human suffering is admirable.  His defense of Christianity as a force for good is stirring.  He is a moralist, but a moralist with a blind spot.  There is something immoral about leaving a dysfunctional, debt-strapped government to future generations, and this country made great headway toward that end during Gerson’s tenure in the White House.

 

[Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t), by Michael J. Gerson (New York: HarperOne) 320 pp., $26.95]