If the defining doctrine of the Republican Party is limited government, the party must move up from nostalgia and leaven its reverence for Reagan with respect for Madison. As Diggins says, Reaganism tells people comforting and flattering things that they want to hear; the Madisonian persuasion tells them sobering truths that they need to know. -- George Will, The Washington Post
Three cheers to Professor Diggins, a friend of this outfit, for slapping some color into our cheeks. George Will is already being accused of having a tin ear for liberty; one can already sense the lip-curling 'rebellion' of the Right's cocktail-napkin crowd to the rube-ishness of what appears to be the Bush Legacy here and in other places. But this impolitic reckoning, one of many this country and its various sects shall have to endure, is one that ought to be borne regardless. Were it not our fate we should want to take it up anyway. In that spirit, then, the following reflections.
The beauty of the Regan paean was that it was a message Every American Could Hear Loud and Clear. Its function, in its rather desperate time, was to present the huddled masses abroad with a compelling alternative to the mothflame power of totalitarian government, and to offer at home a blast of esteem to a people whose temper and dignity had been flattened over the course of an often self-imposedly wretched decade.
But the Madisonian 'message,' unfortunately, hardly amends itself to communication in virtually the only format now accepted: "sending a message." The Madisonian wisdom is that people are passionate, passions are stupid, and even people who aren't stupid are dangerous, particularly when their clarity permits them to prove their usefulness as powerbrokers. This is hard enough to condense on a bumper sticker without getting crude. So that other Madisonian chestnut -- if men were angels no government would be necessary -- has become a liberaltarian anti-creed: there are no angels, silly, and the only necessity of government is the guarantee of the individual rights of men and women.
In similar fashion, the Reaganite bumper sticker becomes a riff on Pink Floyd -- tear down the wall. Nobody likes real walls erected by razor-wire-stringing reupholstered fascisti, smack through the middle of their capital city. But we no longer have the luxury of extending the metaphor of Berlin through the rest of the planet and into the hearts of men. The ridiculous heroization of everday life that has such a complicated and unfortunate relationship with the actual heroism of certain American citizens post-9/11 has fed the Reaganite message through another pop icon, Bowie, reinforcing the anti-wisdom of a whole society of individuals desperate to justify their indulgences as, however fleeting, some sort of sacrifice: we can be "heroes" for just one day.
The challenge for anyone hoping to implement Will's prescription for a move away from can-do Reaganism to please-don't Madisonianism is that the Madisonian platform cannot resonate among a people not firmly educated in their own political, cultural, and, indeed, religious traditions, much less among a people severed from those traditions or indeed actively hostile to them. Reaganism on the other hand can pull in everyone on planet Earth except certain residents of Minnesota and Massachusetts. The brute fact of Karl Rove's proto-"governing majority" is that the GOP built its popularity on a theme destined in its very terminology to transcend and even bracket it. It is very exciting when your political party can offer The People something they very badly desire but do not know how to get -- and on their own terms, no less. But ironically what ethical conservatism must do to recapture its sovereignty as a coherent creed is to put some psychological distance between itself and Party -- and, therefore, National Politics.
One must not any longer resolve to start at the top and work one's way down. By the time you get there the roots will be gone. They have already dissolved to such an extent that I do not believe the wisdom of Madison will reappear at the level of national government without a major jolt to the foundations of late-modern American party politics, and perhaps not even then.
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