My own definition emphasizes the following:
- a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;
- a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;
- veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;
- a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;
- respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;
- a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.
Thus begins Andrew Bacevic's endorsement of Barack Obama in The American Conservative. You may remember Professor Bacevic as the man who had been handed the check for the war in Iraq last Memorial Day as one of many who has lost a loved one in the Iraq War.
Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
He begins his piece in The American Conservative laying out his beliefs, which track remarkably well with mine. In a sense, his article repeats the old trope that "Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed." He indicts Dubya for wearing the flag lapel pin and doing nothing to back up his empty display of patriotic piety:
President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans "safe," he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution...In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.
Bacevic goes on to excorciate McCain as Bush's Third Term in ways that don't really do justice to a phrase as trite as Bush's Third Term. He recognizes the essential core truth of the McCain candidacy:
...we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party.
Bacevic realizes that Barack Obama is no conservative. But, he does realize that given the choice between McCain and perpetual war and Obama and a re-evaluation of the war and the assumptions that undergird the war, there is no real choice:
Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place.
Which is why the architects of the war will fight tooth and nail to get McCain elected. A McCain defeat is a defeat for the entire Neo-Conservative world view, and a decisive one at that. It is the American public's repudiation of the philosophy that got us into the war in the first place. It is the consignment of many proud people to the dust bin of history.
Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now "winning"—as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score. The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world’s oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the "unipolar moment" end up getting filed under dumb ideas.
Coming from a man who has paid a personal price in life, this isn't even close to a stinging indictment. I admire Professor Bacevic's restraint - it would be tough for me not to bring up the phrase "dumbest fucking man on the planet" when mentioning the names of any of the neo-cons. But Bacevic's calm restraint makes his argument even stronger. He is a true patriot who recognizes the choice our country has in less than seven months - we turn a corner, or the abyss. He recognizes that Obama is the man to lead us around that corner, even if Bacevic doesn't think that Obama quite squares with his own personal philosophy, although he does see that McCain represents a dark force even further from his declaration of principles in the first paragraph.
I hope Hillary supporters remember this as they consider pulling the lever for McCain in November.