Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson raises a point I’ve pondered time and again: So much of what is associated with the Reagan “Revolution” is illusion, and those who scream the loudest for a return to the old style limited government and fiscal probity associated with the Reagan era are invoking a myth.

As Gerson observes:

During the Reagan years, big government got bigger, with federal spending reaching 23.5 percent of GDP (compared with just over 20 percent under the current president). But the Reagan reality is more admirable than the myth. He wisely chose what was historically necessary—large defense increases and tax reductions—over what was politically unachievable: a massive rollback of government.

Political expediency by any other name.

Aside from that, Dubya, despite the persistent stereotyping, is no bleeding heart compared with Reagan — really more of a stereotypical Republican grinch if you look at where many of his budget increases have been targeted:

Well over half of President Bush’s spending increases have gone to a range of unexpected security necessities, including military imminent-danger pay, unmanned aerial vehicles and biological-weapons vaccines. Other types of discretionary spending have increased at 3.9 percent a year on average—far below President Clinton’s double-digit growth in his final year. Why don’t anti-government conservatives mention spending increases on defense and homeland security when they make their critique? Because a minimalist state cannot fight a global war—so it is easier for critics to ignore the global war.

Gerson also explores a prevailing distinction within GOP ranks that should not be lost on those of use who harbor strong red tory sympathies: the widely divergent, largely mutually incompatible views of Republican libertarians and conservatives.

The combination of disdain for government, a reflexive preference for markets and an unbalanced emphasis on individual choice is usually called libertarianism. The old conservatives had some concerns about that creed, which Russell Kirk called “an ideology of universal selfishness.”

Conservatives are wary of government, not hostile to it. Within some contexts, they are even willing to stomach a surprisingly ample amount of it so long as it contributes to the common good (e.g., strengthening families, neighborhoods, schools, congregations). And while Republican libertarians — “purists,” as Gerson prefers to call them — still command the rhetorical high ground of debate within the party, many Republican governors, particularly Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, are busy translating authentic conservative principles into practical reality at the grassroots.

But there is another Republican Party—what might be called the party of the governors. It is the party of Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who has improved the educational performance of minority students and responded effectively to natural disasters. It is the party of Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who mandated basic health insurance while giving subsidies to low-income people. Neither of these men embrace big government; both show convincing outrage at wasteful spending. But they have also succeeded in making government work in essential government roles—not a small thing in a post-Katrina world.

Neoconservative Robert Kagan has penned a new book on American imperialism that was reviewed today in the New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

The thesis of Kagan’s book, titled Dangerous Nation, holds that early America’s regard for power politics as “alien and repulsive” is groundless.

Wheatcroft takes exception to this premise and so do I.

Granted, America took its Manifest Destiny very seriously, and arguably pursued it as fanatically and ruthlessly against the Indians as the Germans did their own version against the Slavic East. But there is a significant difference, I think, between continental and global expansionism. As Wheatcroft argues — convincingly, I think — Americans, with a few noteworthy exceptions, ”really did withdraw from the temptations and perils of the world.”

There were exceptions, like the astonishing story of the campaign against the Barbary pirates of North Africa (the Islamofascists of 1804?), when the whole American fleet sailed 4,000 miles to the Mediterranean and the Marines landed on the shores of Tripoli. For all that, by the time this book ends, and for nearly two decades more, no American infantry battalion ever set foot in Europe, and the only great war the American people had ever fought was against each other.

And let’s not forget that from the 1860s to the 1880s, Chile had a larger navy than the United States — a fact even Kagan concedes — hardly evidence of a nation that has harbored imperial ambitions from its very beginning.

I was rather amused that an op-ed by Richard Allen published in today’s New York Times did not once invoke the n-word — neoconservative —  in describing the life and work of the recently deceased Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, despite the fact that she was in many respects the very embodiment of neoconservative influence within the Republican party. 

Like most other neocons, she could point to a very exotic pedigree, at least by traditional GOP standards, and often did.

The very precocious granddaughter of a populist and socialist who organized several left-wing movements in Oklahoma, Jeanne Jordan, as she was then known, formed a Young People’s Socialist League, the youth arm of the Socialist Party of America, on the unlikely campus of Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where she was a student. She recalled in 2002 May Day symposium:

It wasn’t easy to find the YPSL in Columbia, Missouri. But I had read about it and I wanted to be one. We had a very limited number of activities in Columbia, Missouri. We had an anti-Franco rally, which was a worthy cause. You could raise a question about how relevant it was likely to be in Columbia, Missouri, but it was in any case a worthy cause. We also planned a socialist picnic, which we spent quite a lot of time organizing. Eventually, I regret to say, the YPSL chapter, after much discussion, many debates and some downright quarrels, broke up over the socialist picnic. I thought that was rather discouraging.”

A Humphrey Democrat in the late 1960s, Kirkpatrick, along with other intellectuals and trade unionists with strong anti-communist convictions, were aligned with the Social Democrats, USA, which formed the successor organization of the Socialist Party of America. She eventually grew disillusioned with the Democrats and conventional left-wing views on communist containment as the McGovernite wing tightened its grasp within Democratic ranks in the 1970s. But even as this disilluisionment with the Democrats intensified, she still expressed trepidations about aligning herself too closely with the GOP.  (Incidentally, click here for a perversely interesting socialist perspective on the neoconservatives.)

“Listen, Dick, I am an A.F.L.-C.I.O. Democrat and I am quite concerned that my meeting Ronald Reagan on any basis will be misunderstood,” Allen recalls her saying shortly before her first get-acquainted meeting with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Of course, the rest is history. Kirkpatrick apparently managed to repress her strong unionist sentiments to join forces with the Reagan administration, serving as ambassador to the United Nations and bringing many socialist intellectuals into her staff — the so-called “State Department socialists” who soon gained prominence and influence in the Reagan administration and the Republican party.

After denouncing the Democratic party as the “Blame America First party” at the 1984 GOP Convention, she formally became a Republican in 1985 and, for a time, even toyed with seeking the party’s nomination for president, fearing that George H.W. Bush, the presumed successor to Reagan’s legacy, would waver in his opposition to communism.

I have to concede a grudging degree of admiration for Mrs. Kirkpatrick. Nevertheless, reflecting back on the last quarter century of significant neoconservative presence within the GOP policymaking circles, I can’t help but wonder what my party would look like today without them.

Frankly, judging from our track record within the last few years, I’m not so sure it would look that bad.

“Who could have imagined an idiot like Truman one day would be  considered a great president?” my father would ask with some exasperation as the 33rd president’s historical stock began rising a generation ago.

Dad, a staunch Republican, always treated HST with a measure of contempt. “The little bantam rooster,” was his pet name for the feisty Missourian.

I never quite saw it that way. There was, after all, a Lincolnesque quality associated with the man — a quality borne out in David McCullough’s superb biography of this 20^th century giant.

Truman, after all, was the quintessential self-made man, someone who had suffered one business failure after another, who despite being underestimated in every quarter, somehow managed to rise despite the odds. More than that, though, he was an intelligent man, more worldly that most people realized — someone who revered education and read voraciously, striving to fill in those intellectual gaps he missed in the course of his financially deprived youth.

Aside from that, he was the genuine commodity, someone who never took himself too seriously, who was perfectly at ease with himself and who never recoiled from the awesome burden associated with his office. Borrowing a description of a far less politically sensitive age, he was “a man’s man” in every sense of the word.

It’s precisely because of this respect for the 33^rd president that I recoil whenever I see comparisons drawn between him and the 43^rd president.  (Yes, I’m a Republican, but I think I know greatness when I see it — and,for that matter, when I don’t.)

I know the standard arguments: Bush has consistently defied expectations; he’s “grown” in office; he’s willing to make the tough decisions. In short his has been a vastly underestimated — or is that “misunderestimated” — presidency.

Frankly, I just don’t see it. There’s very little Trumanesque about the guy. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who never did much of anything until he sobered up and got religion 20 some years ago. Before that, his only claim to fame was as the alcoholic comic relief of the Bush and Walker clans.

He’s never displayed so much as one iota of intellectual curiosity that I know of, Ivy League credentials notwithstanding. Moreover, as Andrews Sullivan observed recently, he’s never made any attempt to learn on the job, to master the intricacies of 21^st century warfare, much as Lincoln did those of the 19^th and Truman those of the 20^th.

Introspective? A voracious reader? Hardly.

Trumanesque? No, unless you‘re referring to the Jim Carey character.

There was a time when I would have greeted the sectionalization taking place within the GOP with unbridled glee. Now, all I can express is sadness.

If anything, it underscores the irony of politics. As a recent Economist article observes, former Georgia Governor and Sen. Zell Miller wrote a book only a few years ago bemoaning the sectionalization of his own Democratic party. Now, the tables seem to be turned. The GOP, historically the party of national unity, faces the bleak prospect not only of sectionalization but also of provincialism — a party confined only to one section, increasingly parochial, even obscurantist in its outlook.

As the Democrats reinvent themselves to look less like Harvard Yard and more like real America, the GOP looks less like real America, more like the campuses of Baylor or Bob Jones universities. And as the economist observes, there is a real danger here:

The danger for the Republicans is that they will respond to these Democratic advances by retreating to their heartland. The incoming Republican delegation will be more southern and more conservative than ever. It is hardly encouraging that the Senate Republicans have just reinstalled Mississippi’s Trent Lott as one of their leaders—a man who had to give up the top job in 2002 for making a racist remark. There are plenty of Republican activists who think that the future lies in becoming ever more conservative, and not worrying too much about the slow-growing north-east. That sort of thinking led the Democrats to become the Party of Taxachusetts and Michael Dukakis. The Republicans need a Zell Miller of their own.

Most of us in the course of our lives are struck with moments of stunning insight and clarity.

Sometime at around age 15 or 16, I remember watching some low-budget Cold War-era flick about a communist takeover of the United States. Reflecting on it a few days later, I was struck by the rather stark realization that if the United States suffered some major calamity — an invasion or internal collapse of some sort resulting in the utter destruction of our ideals — there would be little left that was definably American.

Of course, way back then I had no idea that far less prosaic minds than mine had been ruminating on and debating this idea for years. We are, after all, a credal nation defined far more by our ideals than by the ancient ethnic or religious bonds that distinguish other nations from one another.

More recently, though, and at the risk of sounding like a neocon, it’s occurred to me that national greatness figures into this too.  From the beginning, we’ve either been a great nation in the making or a great nation in fact. And that raises an equally intriguing, if not unsettling, question: What would an America be like that ceased to be great or, at the very least, that lost much of its luster, one that was viewed less as a model and beacon to other nations and more as a spent historical force?  For that matter how would we Americans deal with it?  Would we follow our post-war British cousins, tying our fortunes to an ascending nation and striving to become its mentor?  Or would we nurse our frustrations in comparative isolation, much like post-Soviet Russia?

If New York Times columnist Paul Samuelson is right, we may be asking these sorts of questions sooner than many of us realize.  What Samuelson foresees is an America more akin to a post-World War I Britain — perhaps not so much a spent force like the Britain that emerged after Second World War but one that is aware of its limitations and less willing to impose its will across the planet.  As Samuelson writes,

America won’t retire from the world stage, but how active it will be is unclear.  Iraq has reduced national confidence and credibility. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending are already twice defense spending. Generational attitudes are shifting. A poll of 18- to 24-year-olds finds that 72 percent don’t think the United States should take the lead in solving global crises, reports Paul Starobin in National Journal.

Presidential hopeful and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney lately has been backing away from earlier, moderate-sounding views on abortion and gay rights, but he can’t deny his impeccable moderate Republican pedigree.

Writing in the Decline and Fall of Liberal Republicans, published in 1989, Nicol E. Rae, a scholar of Republicanism, described Romney’s late father George as a serious 1968 presidential contender and a popular “pragmatic reformer in the progressive tradition.”

Elected 1962 as the first Republican governor of Michigan in more than 14 years, George Romney advocated a “citizens party” vision for the GOP — one that sounded too much like Eisenhower Republicanism to suit many conservative party stalwarts.

At the highly contentious 1964 GOP Convention, Romney also further alienated himself from the Goldwater wing by joining other liberal Republicans — Jacob Javitts, William Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller — in calling for platform amendments on civil rights, nuclear weaponry and party extremism, Rae states in his book.

Romney’s star eventually waned as his public statements sounded less and less like those of a serious presidential contender. The death knell was sounded after his notorious brainwashing statements following a Vietnam tour.

Debate still rages over Brink Lindsey’s premise that an alliance between libertarians and liberalism is feasible following last November’s GOP rout. (For a very detailed summary of this debate from a centrist perspective, see the Daily Kos.)

Maybe the mind of this aging Southern Appalachian hillbilly is just not up to the task of grasping something this complex, but, frankly, folks, I  don’t see this.

Rawls and Hayek aside, I perceive a deep ideological chasm, if not animus, between libertarians and liberals that is simply insurmountable. Much of this is based on personal experience, having spent a big chuck of my early adulthood cavorting with libertarians and fellow travelers. But, of course, much of what we know as the libertarian legacy emerged and thrived in the 20th century as deeply visceral response to the excesses of statism, all forms of statism, including American liberalism.

Two of the founding texts of modern libertarianism were von Mises’s Socialism and von Hayek’s The Road Two Serfdom, both deeply visceral texts aimed squarely at statism. Nineteenth century classical liberalism may have been something of an armchair intellectual enterprise but its 20th century derivative, contrived as the last, desperate act against seemingly triumphant statism, most assuredly was not.

Statism, regardless of the stripe, is libertarianism’s whore of Babylon, much as Rome was Luther’s.

Yes, the conservative animus for statism arguably runs deep but not nearly so deep as that of libertarians. And let’s not forget that conservatism is far less monolithic than its libertarian cousin.

Not a few conservatives within the last century some have expressed a grudging sympathy for liberalism, at least in comparison to liberatarianism, which many conservatives view as godless and rigidly ideological.  Among them was anticommunist crusader Whittaker Chambers, one of the principal inspirations of modern conservativism and an unsparing critic of Ludwig von Mises,

Peter Viereck, a prominent conservative maverick of the 1950s, expressed open sympathy for FDR’s New Deal, crediting it for finally introducing the principle of noblesse oblige into the America political lexicon.  And let’s not forget Pat Buchanan, Mr. “Conservatism of the Heart,” an unapologetic protectionist and devotee of Wilhelm Ropke, an early Third Way advocate and principal architect of the social market economy associated with Germany’s post-war renaissance.   During his 2000 candidacy Buchanan called openly for alliances with progressive elements, albeit with limited success.

Recent developments raise intriguing possibilities.

Longstanding evangelical support for conservatism is fraying. Then again, there was a strong historical irony associated with this cozy political relationship to start with.

By historic definition, evangelical Christianity is decidedly not conservative. And let’s not forget evangelicalism’s historic allegiance to church/state separation doctrine outlined in the First Amendment.  Living all my life in the Deep South, I’ve always felt that even the most committed evangelicals regarded their alliance with political conservatism with profound unease — a matter of necessity and nothing more.

Statements by Rick Warren and other prominent evangelical pastors in recent weeks reflect this unease. Yes, pragmatism figures in to this: The smarter evangelical leaders understand the risk of tying their fortunes too closely to a boat that seems to be listing. But other factors are playing a role, including changing demographics. Younger evangelical Christians, aside from being put off by labels, are far more sympathetic to the sort of practical, applied, red-letter Christianity associated with Bono than to the hellfire-and-brimstone variety of their grandparents.

And let’s not forget the 800-pound gorilla of conservativism, the neoconservatives, whom many on the right never considered conservative in the first place. They started out as Trotskyists, lingered for a while within the Humphrey/Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party, finally, though sometimes grudgingly, casting their fortunes with the right in growing numbers when strident anticommunism was no longer welcome in the  increasingly McGovernized Democratic ranks. While neocons have tended to downplay their statist roots in recent years, their historic affinity for New Deal and Great Society programs is a matter of historic record, earning them the longstanding enmity of more traditional conservatives.

I suspect neoconservatism will be the last ones out of the fusionist door given the mess they’ve made in Iraq, their thinly veiled calls for U.S. imperialism, and the fact that their longstanding feud with many on the left has resulted in the burning of the few bridges that remained.  Simply put, they have no place to go.

Even so, their history and that of other camps within the conservative tent illustrate that in many respects, conservative and progressive aspirations are by no means mutually exclusive. And we must never lose sight of the fact that politics often makes for very strange bedfellows.

One thing is certain: It is a Labour Party volte face of potentially far-reaching proportions.

In a speech yesterday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that immigrants had “a duty” to assimilate into mainstream culture.  He also presented a series of requirements for ethnic minorities who wished to call themselves British.

These include “equality of respect” — especially better treatment of Muslim women by men — allegiance to the rule of law and a command of English.

The Daily Telegraph characterized Labour’s reversal as the end of multiculturalism.

If newcomers weren’t willing to subscribe to longstanding British traditions of tolerance, they should stay away, Blair said.

“Conform to it; or don’t come here. We don’t want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed.

One self-described Canadian red tory blogger expressed mixed emotions about changes.

To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it. Part of me has an appreciative sympathy with the core sentiment, but I can also see its more problematic aspects that contradict our long-standing tradition of respecting diversity and free expression. There’s something a bit troubling about the notion of integrating “with the mainstream of society” by force of law.

Frankly, I don’t see this. Tolerance, after all, is a value closely bound with the rule of law, one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization and one of the factors that have contributed to our becoming the most democratic, prosperous and technologically advanced civilization in the world.

Shouldn’t immigrants who come to the West to share in these achievements be expected to subscribe to the values that made them possible in the first place? Is this really asking too much?

The incomparable Andrew Sullivan blogged an except from his most recent book, The Conservative Soul, which provides a succinct and very workable definition of toryism — not to mention a rationale for why I created this blog.

Tories revere tradition above all things. But they understand that tradition, like everything else associated with the human condition, must bend with the times. Benjamin Disraeli, one of the principal inspirations of red toryism, understood this essential truth better than any public figure of his century. He perceived the social and cultural upheavals taking place around him and the dangers posed to Britain and toryism alike if a  way were not found to come to terms with these changes.

Disraeli grasped the essense of conservatism: that it is first and foremost about realism, understanding both the permance and impermanence associated with the human condition and adapting our actions accordingly.