FOR A POLITICAL group feared and envied in unequal measure around the world, America’s conservatives are looking a bit battered these days.
When President George W. Bush was re-elected five months ago, with increased Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, the progressive world let out a piercing wail. The election was confirmation, it ululated, that America was in the grip of a dark and reactionary force. Abroad, George Bush’s America would be busy invading innocent foreign countries, while at home it would establish a Christian fundamentalist-Wall Street supremacy over American life.
In this fantasy-caricature of America, Enron fat cats would march arm in arm with biblical creationists to build a sort of theocratic kleptocracy (or is that a kleptocratic theocracy?). Enraptured Christians would ascend the celestial staircase while the poor and homeless suffered as public services were sacrificed to the market. The wealthy would spend their ever-larger tax cuts on ever-larger 4x4s, while women would shuffle down back streets in search of a coathanger-abortionist. Colleges around the country would substitute Genesis for science in the curriculum as elderly Americans watched their pension savings shipped off to investment bankers.
Well it’s only five months, I know, but the facts are, as the lawyers like to say, not exactly lending themselves to this interpretation. Indeed since the Republican ascendancy was confirmed last November, very little has gone the conservatives’ way.
The flagship of President Bush’s domestic second-term agenda — the limited, cautious introduction of some choice into the state-run social security pension system — is sinking rapidly, holed by widespread public opposition to any attempt to bring private funds into a programme that is on course to swallow up half the national budget in 50 years’ time.
Social security occupies much the same place in the American psyche as the National Health Service does in Britain. Like the NHS, it is an unapproachable shrine of welfarism. It resists all attempts to reform it. Even when its financial future is imperilled by adverse demographic and economic trends, the public seems reluctant to abandon its essentially socialist premise of generous benefits funded by all for all. Though the search for reform goes on in Washington, the canary in this coalmine succumbed weeks ago.
Just as conservatives were reeling from this blow to their ambitions along comes the case of Terri Schiavo, who died yesterday. This tale of a brain-damaged woman looked a tailor-made opportunity for the Religious Right to reassert its supposed supremacy. When Mrs Schiavo’s shifty-looking and adulterous husband suddenly remembered (years after the start of her trauma) that she had demanded to be put to death should she find herself in such a state, and then managed to get the Florida courts to agree to starve her to death, President Bush and the Republicans seized the moment and intervened.
They failed, as we now know. Not just legally, as judge after judge insisted that the husband had an inalienable right to kill his wife, but politically, when polls suggested that a large majority of Americans agreed.
Worse still for conservatives, the Schiavo case has reopened old fissures among themselves and led to speculation that the unwieldy coalition they represent may not survive. Constitutional traditionalists and states-rights advocates are appalled that religious conservatives used the federal Government to try to wrest control over the case from courts and state officials. Libertarians don’t like government of any sort getting in the way of families’ rights to make these decisions for themselves.
The past few months have provided a useful reminder of the limits and the challenges to American conservatism. They have helped too to debunk much of the silliness that passes for depictions of America in the international media today. America’s conservatives are not a monolithic bunch, moving in lock step towards the steady realisation of their right-wing nirvana of low taxes, divinely ordained foreign policy and capital punishment on demand.
They are, rather, a broad coalition of factions and ideologies that unite around certain issues and fall apart over others. You can be the sort of free-market conservative who believes that social security needs to give way to a more market-based approach and at the same believe that the government has no right determining if brain-damaged people live or die. Or you can be a Christian who thinks government should make every effort to create God ’s kingdom on earth but still find the ideas of a publicly funded pension system a rather attractive one.
More important, conservatives may have scored some political successes in the past 25 years but the idea that they have been the driving force in American politics is grotesquely overdone. By most hard measures conservatives have failed to shift American law and society in their direction since they became a political force 40 years ago. Abortion law has hardly budged one jot in the 32 years since Roe v Wade ushered in one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the world. The death penalty was restored in the 1970s but in the past five years it has been in full retreat. The number of executions in America has almost halved in the past six years, driven lower by growing concern about wrongful convictions and the Supreme Court recently putting further limits on the application of the death penalty to minors.
In the economic field, President Bush has signed into law the largest federal programme since the 1960s, with the expansion of Medicare, the health insurance system for the elderly.
The idea that America’s educational institutions, media and entertainment are now in the grip of some hypernationalist, reactionary, theological frenzy, a popular myth on the Left inside and outside America, is simply divorced from any reality, as anyone who has followed the travails of Larry Summers at Harvard, or an average evening’s television programme can attest.
That the supposedly invincible Wall Street-Christian fundamentalist conservative coalition could lose on social security and the Schiavo case is a testament to the continued existence of a very different America — one conservatives are striving, rightly, to change.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
