ANYTHING BUT ...
Federal and local Republican officeholders call themselves conservative, but this book counters such claims
BY DOUG FRENCH

For those who thought having a Republican President and Republican majorities in both the 

House and Senate would mean lower taxes and smaller government, W's administration makes one almost long for the days of Bill Clinton. In fact, George W. Bush has increased non-defense spending at a rate twice what Monica's boyfriend did. This is not your daddy's Republican party. Old Right conservatives like Robert Taft or Howard Buffet are nowhere to be found.

Bush's brand of big-government conservatism is emblematic of what John Dean calls "authoritarian conservatism" in his book Conservatives Without Conscience. 

You may remember Dean from Nixon's Watergate scandal. Dean calls himself a Goldwater conservative, having been influenced by the late Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. The title of Dean's book is a play on Goldwater's famous The Conscience of a Conservative.

Goldwater, before he died, had grown disenchanted with the current crop of conservatives. He found them thuggish and believed that they were "acting like jerks, not conservatives," according to Dean. In Goldwater's view, the problem is the social or cultural conservatives.

According to Dean, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are prototypical conservatives without conscience, and "at heart they are tough, cold-blooded, ruthless authoritarians." Contemporary conservatism is moralistic, negative, arrogant, condescending, self-righteous and authoritarian.

Dean provides a profile of both authoritarian leaders and followers and chronicles the history of authoritarian conservatives in American government, starting with Alexander Hamilton, through the rise of the neocons to the present Bush administration.

Dean worries about the 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population that is very right-wing authoritarian. These people are scared, self-righteous, ill-informed, dogmatic and very politically active, much more active than average Americans. Dean is concerned that if reasonable people don't get involved in the democratic process, the conservative authoritarians "will take American democracy where no freedom-loving person would want it to go."

John Dean is not the only conservative alarmed with the present state of the Republican Party. New York Post columnist Ryan Sager provides a useful history of the fusionism between Libertarians and evangelicals in the Republican Party and the subsequent abandonment of that alliance that has split the GOP in The Elephant In The Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and The Battle To Control The Republican Party.

Sager describes the history of modern conservatism as "a marriage, with all of the attendant ups and downs, spats and make-ups, flirtations and frustrations, and distance traveled together by souls sharing a common purpose." The traditionalists like Russell Kirk and Richard M. Weaver most valued tradition and social order. Kirk believed "political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems." Sager refers to Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman when presenting the Libertarian view that the highest value is human freedom.

"Libertarians considered traditionalists little dictators, aching to subject their fellow man to one particular view of God's will," Sager writes. "Traditionalists considered Libertarians imitation anarchists, isolating man from society and reducing him to nothing more than the sum of his material desires."

These two divergent groups were fused together by ex-communist Frank Meyer to take over the Republican Party in 1964, the year a reluctant Barry Goldwater ran for President against Lyndon Johnson.

This fragile partnership has fallen apart with the Bush administration's big government conservatism. The days of a Republican Ronald Reagan telling Reason Magazine: "The very heart and soul of conservatism is Libertarianism," or saying, "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" seems like a long, long time ago.

The Libertarians and traditionalists no longer have a common enemy, as they did during the cold war - communism, or during the Clinton years, Bill and Hillary. Because of the split, Sager believes the Republican Party has lost its way, heading "toward big government and away from small government. Toward politics and away from principle. Toward the South and away from the West. Toward moralism and away from morality." He urges a swift return to Frank Meyer's fusionism.

Conservatives, especially aspiring candidates, should read both of these books. So many candidates I meet have no sense of conservative history. They have no idea of the Libertarian influence that once was so prevalent in the party. They see the likes of Bush and Cheney, and assume they are conservatives just because they call themselves Republicans. These two, and sadly many GOP officeholders in Nevada, are anything but. LW

Doug French, associate editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine, is an executive vice president of a Nevada bank. He is the 2005 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Award from the Center for Libertarian Studies.