Conservative Schism: Neocon v. Libertarians

“Today's conservatism is becoming yesterday's liberalism.”
Andrew Sullivan

There has been a drastic ideological shift within liberal and conservative priority, a shift involving the powers of government. To examine this transition, an assumption must be made: the connection between god and politics is always strongest when the belief that communal wellbeing must be restored on federal level. Liberals, once, shared this very special connection with god. For example, liberals once used god to preach societal betterment through government initiated reform: abolition, suffrage, and civil rights movement. In fact, it was Martin Luther King Jr., not George Bush, who once said about the civil rights movement, “If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”

However, after the 1960s, the liberal social initiative had shifted from the federal level, to the personal level, and so too liberalism lost its connection with god. Rather than have the government enact change, the citizen had to enact it: if you don’t like what’s on television turn the channel; if you don’t like gay marriage, don’t marry a gay person; if you don’t like a women’s freedom of choice, don’t give yourself the freedom to choose. After the 1960s, religion became the “opium of the masses” rather than the key to societal preservation.

Within conservatism the exact opposite has happened. The new age of conservatism is based around powers of the federal government, and in turn, a connection to god. Conservatism, it seems, has been stripped of its libertarian-laissez faire roots, and hijacked by the neoconservative religion right. What happened to small government? What happened to states rights? What’s happened is the rights of the states have been replaced by the right of federal involvement in social crisis, crisis that threatens the word of god. It’s pretty clear that in the conservative base, federalism has been replaced by christianism, and individual rights have been replaced with a federal right to intervene at will.

We are now amidst an evangelical crusade to completely invert and subvert conservatism, a crusade to nullify states rights, and a crusade to dictate the social climate. When did it become the conservative prerogative to dictate the moral standards of the day? When did it become the federal government’s obligation to micromanage steroids or to get in between a husband and his wife’s desire to die with dignity? The religious right is corrupting the fundamental principals behind duel federalism, ideals intrinsically connected with republicanism.

In fact, the only difference between Bill Clinton and George Bush’s fiscal policy, is that George Bush’s government is even bigger and substantially less solvent. What’s the difference between old time conservative Pat Buchanan’s foreign policy of isolationism and the liberal onslaught on Bush’s Middle East policy? Nothing. According to neo-conservatism, a states’ decision on, say, medical marijuana, gay marriage, or the right to die, is void if it contradicts the message of god. The next four years, I have come to believe, will be less about “defining the liberal conviction” and more about the internal conservative warfare between the Grand Old Party and the neoconservative right, warfare between the federal government's role in republican society. Where are the days when Ronald Reagan said, "The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority"?

This topic has been addressed: Daily Dish, A View From the West