Book Review Conscience of a Conservative - Jeff Flake

What's a conservative anyway?

The Republican Party isn't simply "conservative" or "right wing." Since the 1950s, there's been an ongoing battle for the heart of the party. In addition to the small contingent of radicals from the libertarian wing, there are also the constitutional conservatives, and the reactionaries. In the 1950s, the founders of the National Review pushed fusionism to force a combination of the libertarian radicals and the traditionalist reactionaries. As the years went by, the constitutional conservatives were left on the outside (Republican President Eisenhower and his colleagues were smeared within their own party as communist appeasers -- look it up. So any modern use of the term "conservative" is suspect. Do they mean the conservatism of a moderate reformist Burkean or do they mean unfettered markets combined with retrograde social politics? Do they mean a government that can operate within its means or a "starve the beast" strategy that pushes tax cuts without a fiscal means of supporting them?

With that said, it's a challenge sometimes to look within the GOP (as it is with the Democratic Party) to find those people who are allies. There are so few now who ring bells of clarity and common sense, as many have been driven out of the two major parties into independent status. RINO and DINO hunting is a favorite activity of radical activists who seek party purity and the creation of European-style leftism and right-wing politics. With that said, I gave Jeff Flake's Conscience of a Conservative a shot, thinking that, maybe, his stance against the current administration would draw tones of Burkean sanity and restraint.

Is it enough to look only at a legislator's voting record to determine where they stand philosophically? No, there's a long record of realignment over time. Kasich, for example, changed from a tea party insurgent during the 2010 Ohio gubernatorial election to a pragmatic conservative as the entire political landscape changed. Ditto for many early tea party darlings. There are also so few potential allies that it's a counterproductive exercise.

Where is Flake?

Flake claims to be a Goldwaterite and a Reaganaut, both ultimately children of the Buckley revolution. This is not surprising, given that this book is named after Goldwater's thin manifesto. So where has conservatism lost its way, according to Flake? By several powerful forces, namely nationalism, populism, xenophobia, extreme partisanship, and celebrity. For my part, I view some moderate inclusive nationalism as a virtue, but the remainder of the items are an unmitigated bad. I would also set the date for the degradation of the Republican party as beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. When Buckley (a brilliant thinker) opened the modern door to conservatism, he also left the door open to an excess of ideology, which crowded out empirical thought. There was a nascent school of conservatism that actually preceded Buckley, independent of the Old Right. Peter Viereck, for example, had long before developed a modern cultural critique of post-war liberalism. That conservative thread, superior to Buckley's, was lost to time.

Back to the topic, I have some frank differences of opinion with Flake. Flake's economic school of thought straddles a line between reactionary, conservative, and libertarian radical. Flake's early economic thought reflected an obsession with the rate of taxation, entirely devoid of what is delivered in exchange for those taxes. The effective rate of taxation becomes reminiscent of some manner of magic formula in his orthodoxy. I think every generation of voters has the freedom to determine what level of services it needs, withough aspersions cast for increased or decreased services. It's the job of the executive to deliver those services as effectively as possible, and the role of the legislature to budget and allocate the appropriate levels of funding for those services. If the taxes that the voters are willing to bear are unable to fund those services, then the programs need to be cut.

It is at this point that we find where the left and the right are little different. The right doesn't want the services, while the left wants them. But neither want to pay for them, and both are increasingly comfortable with running massive deficits. For the left, it's the new voodoo of modern monetary theory. For the right, it's the false "Starve the Beast" theology. The right tends to believe, without any support in reality, that if it keeps cutting funding for programs though tax cuts, that programs will just disappear, as if legislators or their voting base actually care about deficits. The perverse side effect of "Starve the Beast" is that voters no longer know exactly how much the services they're receiving cost, because they are receiving a level of taxation that is substantially below the level of services they're receiving. If the right wanted to actually see a decrease in the level of services that voters receive, they would simply require that funding for programs were taxed at a rate consistent with the cost of services received. THAT'S fiscal conservatism. At a certain level of taxation, the taxpayer's ability to consume necessary services and goods, and tax outrage will certainly take shape.

What the young Flake advocated, on the other hand, is reminiscent of fiscal libertarianism. It's a get-your-cake-and-eat-it-too method of operation that has made peace with the far left. It is a trade of small reckonings every year with a giant reckoning at some indeterminate point in the future. "Well, big deal," say the older and more affluent modern GOP voter, "let my grandchildren pay for this, because I'll be dead by then." The older and wiser Flake seems to understand this, which is why he now rejects the Norquist 'No Tax' pledge, insisting that a ten-dollars-in-spending-cuts-for-one-dollar-in-tax-increases is a no-brainer. With that in mind, he supports the goals of Simpson-Bowles, and that commission's intent to drive down debt increases intelligently and responsibly.

But is Flake an ally?

Flake also decries attacks on objective truth and the tendency among the right to traffic in conspiracy theory, pulling the John Birch Society into the mix. For those unaware, the founder of the John Birch Society called Dwight D. Eisenhower a “a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” The organization represented the paranoid, reactionary tendency in American through throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Birchers believed everyone who disagreed with the reactionary school of politics to be an active communist or communist sympathizer. Among those items that the Birchers opposed were "the civil rights movement, federal aid to education, collective bargaining, foreign aid, income taxes, the Social Security system and cultural exchange with communist countries." Flake sees that reactionary element alive and resurgent today.

Putting all this together, is Flake an ally? Sure. At very worst, he's an honorable opponent. I'll take that. I just wish that these people who have an epiphany about doing the right thing would come to the realization before they're walking out the door of public life. They need to run and win on these matters, and not just drop them on the table as they walk out the door.
 

Comments

polisci84

howdy
Feb 6, 2015
282
2
18
40
Ohio
I consider Flake a coward. Just a sham of a politician who had an chance to pull together enough senators to say stop. Too little too late for that guy.
 

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