One of the biggest mistakes conservatives have made in recent years is to assume that government, especially at the federal level, can effectively transmit their values now that the Republicans hold power in Washington, D.C.
As recently as in the 1990s, conservatives presented the federal government as an aggressor against the nuclear family and traditional values. Welfare as we knew it before 1996, semi-pornographic “art” funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, many of the constitutionally dubious expenditures of the Department of Education—all these represented federal activities that were offensive to conservatives, economic and social alike.
Ten years later, social conservatives don’t worry so much about the negative impact of federal programs on family cohesion or basic values. Instead it is taken for granted that a Republican-controlled state apparatus can be conducive to faith, family, morality and conservative culture. Rather than subsidizing Mapplethorpe, the same federal government can finance the much-ballyhooed faith-based initiatives.
Periodically, reality intervenes. So much of what the modern state does cuts only one way: to the left. Ronald Reagan used to argue that as government expands, liberty contracts. It is equally true that the expansion of government forces the retrenchment of Edmund Burke’s little platoons—family, churches, communities, voluntary organizations. Just as surely as government spending crowds out private investment, it crowds out civil society.
Writing in response to the recent federal court ruling against the teaching of intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania, nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas argued, “It should awaken religious conservatives to the futility of trying to make a secular state reflect their beliefs.”
Instead of trying to restore prayer and Bible reading in public schools, Thomas contended that religious conservatives should take charge of their own children’s education. That means removing them from secular government institutions and home-schooling them or placing them in Christian or Jewish schools. He wrote: “Too many parents who would never send their children to a church on Sunday that taught doctrines they believed to be wrong have had no problem placing them in state schools five days a week where they are taught conflicting doctrines and ideas.”
There are many points in Thomas’ column with which one could quibble. There are many fine public schools. Shouldn’t religious parents have equal participation in the public schools their tax dollars finance? Is there anything to intelligent design? Aren’t Christians called to engage the broader culture?
But the overall argument is valid, no matter how much Bush-era social conservatives have preferred to put their trust in political power. Most of what is important in life exists outside the realm of politics or government. There is a limit to what election victories and public-policy debates can accomplish.
The main task of any realistic conservative politics is not to use government to impart traditional values, however good it might be if that were possible. Conservatives should seek to carve out as large a place for normal life and protect it against the intrusions of a hostile culture and government.
That means preserving the ability of parents to instruct children in their own value systems and indoctrinate them in the family’s faith. This means limiting government and maximizing each taxpayer’s income retention. It means that spending on health care, education, transportation should be increased—and that the spender should be the family, not the federal government.
Social conservatives are often wrongly blamed for the right’s big-government drift. Nevertheless, there is some merit to the charge that they too have embraced the swollen state as a solution to society’s ills. But they should take the lead in rejecting big-government conservatism because the family and civil society are far more important to protecting their values than Washington political maneuvers.
Conservatives who forget the primacy of the family and private sector are doomed to repeat the liberals’ mistakes—and to replicate their political failures.
Well said.
The republican government of our great nation was designed as a necessary evil to ensure the growth of individual liberty.
The problem for conservatives is that due to fifty years of media and pubic
school propagandizing, the entire political spectrum in the U.S. has shifted
to the left. The Republican Party is now the Democrat Party of the 1950s.
President Bush, while certainly the best of the candidates for the job, is
no classic conservative. What’s frightening is the way the media goes into
attack mode any time a true conservative looks like he or she has a chance
to gain political office. As for me, I’m now voting for Libertarian
candidates in local and state elections.
All right on the mark, with this proviso. As much as I would like to go my own way: the larger government becomes, the more it intrudes into our private lives. One hundred years ago it would have been unthinkable for government agencies to dictate to parents how to raise our children. Now, they do so with reckless abandon. If you have your child in a private school, the state still has some ability to intrude and dictate content. If your child is behaviorally disordered and difficult to manage the state will find you an unfit parent and remove your kid from the home. If you object to sex education being taught to your children, it will anyway.
In addition to insinuating itself into the family, it controls the content of our expression in any public, even commercial, forum. By taxing us beyond the legitimate needs of government, it sets itself up to play insurer, doling back to us what was ours in a scheme to make us dependent on government. In so doing, government destroys the relation that,in the original, made it subservient to us. Without that relationship, we are at the mercy of government to intrude in our lives and dictate our values. Thus, we cannot afford to be detache from the business of government and must do all we can to return the relation to what it was.
I agree with the primary thesis of this article. We must decrease the size of our lumbering government and its associated tax structure or we will be reduced to utter dependency and our children will be taken from us. The larger government takes our money in ever-increasing chunks, making family budgets increasingly difficult to balance. Parents on the proverbial treadmill lose the capability to interact meaningfully with their children. Conservatives must be prepared to make some changes in their lives to combat this problem, and it won’t be easy. First, we must accept a lower standard of living in order to teach our children. That might mean paying for private school or one parent staying home to homeschool. Second, we must pull the plug on the television, that purveyor of idiot ideology and smut. That may sound difficult, but the intellectual life cannot flower while “Jerry Springer” is on the family tube. Finally, we need to live out our own values without hypocrisy. When conservatives model stable families, unassailable ethics, and personal success, people will notice. We can no longer afford to allow our values to be dictated to us by an increasingly hostile and ill-informed culture. My two cents.
Dear Intellectual Conservative,
As a general rection to aformentioned commentary; I agree that government should be restricted to traditional constituational bounds and as a Darwinian Christian I argue that the essence of the courts ruling is correct. A school must perpetuate the standard theory which is accepted by many Christians and scientists alike. Frankly, a biology textbook is not only comprised of evolutionary theory. If their exists a student who disagrees with Evolution through natural selection that student has the right to espouse a dissenting opinion. In regard to the more general topic of the essay; the only thing that needs to be considered is the fact that without agitation by the citizenry the entire nation would descend into moral relativism and religous percecussion of religous Christians, Jews, and Moslems. In essence, the social conservatives need to focus on abortion and the family through the courts and not through illegal means such as the wya that several congressional Republicans acted during the Terri Schiavo affair. Mr. Thomas is right to plee for limited government however, is wrong considering all the crimes of the Left towards basic human morality. If the right could fight moral relativism through Constructionists such as Judge Alito and Roberts and not through Statism, then, and only then will America’s traditons and freedoms be restored.