This understanding of political conservatism does not mean that conservatives see no value in correcting bad law. The laws of Southern states that explicitly discriminated against black Americans, effectively denying them civil rights, constituted one such case. Notably, all mainstream conservatives agree that insuring against unequal treatment by government entities is the proper use of law -- but conservatives were publicly split in the 1960s over whether law should try to "cure" the people of discriminatory ideas when they acted in their private capacity. Such luminaries as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater led the faction that opposed government activism in the latter case.
They did so because government that intends to "cure" the people has to be, by any definition, "big." Like our federal government today, it has to be vigilant over speech and suspicious of religion. It has to criminalize more and more kinds of discretionary behavior. It has to thwart the people when they vote at the local level or when their state representatives pass laws favored by majorities. It often goes further, to subsidize social patterns disapproved by a majority of the people in an attempt to mitigate the naturally destructive consequences of those patterns.
That's big government. Too many of today's libertarians reflexively accept the inverted proposition that government is somehow "small" if it is busy defending -- and even encouraging -- behavior that parents naturally counsel their children against. There is a whiff of lingering adolescence about this posture, but the most important feature of it is that it depends on a view of government as prescriptive and ideological, rather than defensive and pragmatic. All conservatives would benefit today from reflecting on the view of government with which we approach social issues, and understanding that we have a fundamental disagreement with the political Left in that regard.
J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval intelligence officer and evangelical Christian. She retired in 2004 and blogs from the Inland Empire of southern California. She writes for Commentary's CONTENTIONS blog, Hot Air's Green Room, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
For earlier entries in her Optimistic Christian column, see here and here.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In