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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The newest, most outspoken critics of the war on terrorism and Iraq are conservatives.
Dec 13, 2002 | Chuck Baldwin, a radio host in Pensacola, Fla., is as right-wing as they come. He's the chairman of the state chapter of the Moral Majority and the founder and pastor of Pensacola's Crossroad Baptist church, where his guest speakers have included Jerry Falwell and Patrick Buchanan. His Web site features a waving Confederate flag, pictures of a "memorial to aborted babies," and rants about Bill Clinton's murder of Vince Foster.
But he's no Bush supporter either. In fact, as he wrote in a widely Web-circulated Nov. 26 essay, the "Bush administration seems determined to turn our country into the most elaborate and sophisticated police state ever devised."
As the Bush White House faces a predictable chorus of left-wing critics complaining about increasing encroachments into civil liberties in the name of fighting terror, it has also begun to hear from more and more conservatives saying the same thing.
The ACLU expects former Rep. Bob Barr -- the Georgia Republican who was a driving force behind the Clinton impeachment -- to join the group as a consultant on privacy issues, and it's negotiating with Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) to do the same. Phyllis Schlafly, the Eagle Forum founder and ERA opponent, worries that some Pentagon programs are leading us toward the "Big Brother government as imagined by George Orwell." Lisa Dean, director of the center for technology policy at right-wing Republican activist Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, describes Bush's expansion of domestic surveillance programs as "antithetical to everything we stand for." New York Times hawk William Safire has made similar points in his column, warning, "This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter" -- the Iran-contra operative who now heads the Defense Department's Information Awareness Office -- "gets the unprecedented power he seeks."
The dramatic political realignments among the left occasioned by Sept. 11 have been well documented. Schisms have opened among erstwhile comrades over the proper response of what commentator Christopher Hitchens calls "Islamo-facism" -- and over our culpability in fomenting it in the first place. Below the liberal radar, through, similar shake-ups are happening on the right. Though plenty of people on the right have always been authoritarian cultural conservatives, there's also been a strong libertarian strain in the conservative movement. Now, conservative libertarian principles -- chiefly small government and individual liberty -- are clashing with a triumphant right-wing radicalism eager to exercise American power and make the world anew.
"We're not dealing with traditional conservatism," Baldwin says. "We're dealing with pseudo-conservatism that's very accommodating of big government instead of resisting big government and promoting individual freedom."
Half a century ago, in the inaugural edition of the right-wing National Review, William F. Buckley wrote that it was the duty of conservatives to "stand athwart history and yell 'Stop!'" Now the Weekly Standard -- the must-read barometer for Bush foreign policy -- crows, "The Left wallows in cynicism, while the Right is full of starry-eyed dreamers." This right wing, run by neoconservative ex-'60s radicals, is the chief engine of a new kind of radicalism in America. The administration is seizing unprecedented powers in its righteous war against terrorism. The radicalism of the right -- its overarching vision of a changed world -- may be why some left defectors like Hitchens seem to feel more comfortable among them than among liberal defenders of the status quo.
But it's also why some old-school conservatives, dedicated by definition to defending the status quo, suddenly appear to be alienated.
Philip Gold, a former Georgetown professor who campaigned for Barry Goldwater, worked on Steve Forbes' presidential run, and has written for publications like the Weekly Standard and the American Spectator, finds the new direction of the conservative movement so disturbing that he's pulled a Hitchens. He recently resigned from his job as a senior fellow in National Security Affairs at Seattle's conservative Discovery Institute because of his opposition to the war with Iraq, and bid farewell to the right in general in a Seattle Weekly article called, natch, "Goodbye to All That."
