One only need flip to so-called conservative Fox News Channel to hear pundits and politicians chastising the Obama administration for not being confrontational enough in their absurdly belligerent policy towards Russia, or their highly imprudent bombing campaign against ISIL in the Middle East. One need only attend a press conference involving the Republican’s leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, or any of his uncharismatic cronies, to hear a lecture on why anything other than a carte blanche to the police and security services would compromise America’s safety (as if turning America into a totalitarian police state, to which such an attitude logically leads, would not compromise America’s safety). But how in the world is a predilection to engage in armed conflict, the single greatest catalyst for an increase in state power, really conservative?
Those on the left like to say that the Tea Party Movement is the most dangerous thing about the Republican Party today. But they are wrong. For there is no more menacing, hypocritical force in American politics today than the so-called “moderate” wing of the Republican Party establishment, and their love for all things war-related.
In order to understand just how un-conservative the Republican establishment has become on the question of war, it is instructive to note that conservatives have been traditionally much more opposed to military incursions on foreign soil than their liberal peers. The Mexican-American War was thoroughly the work of Democrat James Polk, who claimed Andrew Jackson’s mantle as a fighter for the humble American farmer, but was himself an expansionist zealot who did much to increase the power of the executive (and don’t take my word for the injustice of his war — see what Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant had to say on the matter); and yet how interesting to have seen Carl Rove, some years ago, saying he considered James Polk to be one of our greatest presidents.
Britain’s interventionist policies of the 19th century were brought on primarily by liberal ministries headed by Lord Palmerston, and it was the young Conservative Politician Benjamin Disraeli, who famously referred to Britain’s colonies as a “millstone round our necks.” Later in the century, it was the liberal statesman William Gladstone who sent pamphlets all over Britain condemning Disraeli’s policy of non-intervention after reports of Russian atrocities in the Balkans during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.
Britain entered World War I at the behest of H.H Asquith and members of his Liberal Administration, who were the authors of the famous “people’s budget” of 1910, and it was Woodrow Wilson’s Democrats who got America involved. It was liberal hero Franklin Roosevelt who, despite heavy opposition from largely isolationist Republicans, edged America towards war with Germany in 1940-41. Though modern liberals largely earned their stripes opposing the Vietnam war, even they will acknowledge it was President Lyndon Johnson, a patron saint of liberal domestic policy, who began our military escapade in Southeast Asia with the lie that became the basis of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, passed by Congress with only two dissenting votes. Subsequent support for the war by many conservatives had, to their credit, more to do with being loath to adapt a policy of what they thought of as abandoning our South Vietnamese allies, whom we had essentially goaded into war in the early 1960s, than any general affinity for military intervention.
Today, however, there is no greater supporter for turning America into a war-mongering police state than the supposedly more conservative of our two main political parties, the Republican Party. A good example of this is the Senate Republicans’ filibuster of the USA Freedom Act, which would have enacted some moderate reforms on the NSA’s illegal spying practices: All but four Republicans voted to block the bill from coming to a vote. Interestingly enough, the short list of the four Republicans who voted to allow the bill to be voted on read like a who’s who of Tea Party senators: Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Dean Heller, and also Lisa Murkowski (who knew she had real conservative blood in her?). Rand Paul, who voted against cloture, said he wanted to allow the Patriot Act, which had been used used to justify the NSA spying, to completely expire in June. At that date, I have no doubt that the Republican Party would have used all of its power to push for as close to an un-amended renewal as possible.
What is the reason for all of this Republican hypocrisy? The answer lies in the fact that the present Republican Party is not a conservative party at all. It is the party of phony-conservatism, the precepts of which may be summarized as follows: Let people do whatever they like, fund and support their policy of doing whatever they like, and if and when they fail, if they are rich enough, bail them out at the tax payer’s expense.
It is not at all hard to see that nothing could be less conservative as a principle. Such a principle is, in fact, exactly the reverse of any true principle of conservatism, which might run as follows: There our certain things which, the wisdom of the ages has taught us, should be avoided if we can possibly help it, and certain powers that must be contained, whether it be in the form of excessive state interference in the private sphere, military intervention abroad, corporate excess, and corruption, both public and private. In this sense, the conservative is skeptical of change, but also zealous for containing excesses, and often in favor of changing things back to the way they used to be.
But phony conservatives do not, by nature, care about containing abuses or righting wrongs. They would prefer to do nothing, and let the people, by which they usually mean rich people, have their way. But this is not something that can be sold to the public at election time. So instead, they invent wars as a means of assuring voters that they are actually doing something to address society’s problems, by combating so-called existential threats to our national security. Since they have no policies to address anybody’s problems — except perhaps those of their rich friends who don’t feel they have enough license to do whatever they like, or those of the security services whose carte blanche to spy on whomever they like is at risk of being curtailed — they wage wars in other people’s countries, to conveniently hide the fact that they are ideologically against doing anything to solve the problems facing our own country.
If they can find no convincing reason to go to war, they invent false reasons, such as the absurd pretext for war in Iraq, which after 12 years might seem laughable if it were not so dangerous, as exemplified by Dick Cheney’s public defense of torture. Democrats, who largely gave in to the “do what whatever you like” economic consensus of the 1980s, after the “do what ever you like” social consensus of the late 60s and early 70s, have tended to go along. But at least they don’t pretend to be conservative. Nor, of course, do they pretend to be conservative when supporting the latest war; and thus they are a great deal less hypocritical than their Republican, phony-conservative peers, who never saw a war they didn’t like.
