Shadow Government

A front-row seat to the Republicans' debate over foreign policy, including their critique of the Biden administration.

Specter, Cheney, Douthat, and the future of the GOP

By Christian Brose What if Cheney had been the GOP’s nominee in 2008? That’s Ross Douthat’s question in his terrific debut column for the New York Times. His answer: better for the country and better for Republicans. Cheney would have more truly reflected the views now prevailing in the GOP, thereby drawing sharper distinctions and ...

By Christian Brose

What if Cheney had been the GOP’s nominee in 2008? That’s Ross Douthat’s question in his terrific debut column for the New York Times. His answer: better for the country and better for Republicans. Cheney would have more truly reflected the views now prevailing in the GOP, thereby drawing sharper distinctions and fostering more illustrative debates with Obama-style liberalism.

Here’s Ross:

"Real conservatism," in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

Now that Arlen Specter has jumped ship from the GOP, Ross’s thought experiment may yet happen, for completely different reasons. The "real conservatism" that Ross ascribes to Cheney (accurately, I think) is even more potent among Congressional Republicans. And there is every reason to believe it will become even more so now that Democrats are well on their way to a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Rarely has a party grown less hard-line in its views and less disposed to ideological conflict as its responsibility for governing decreases. If it’s an intellectual battle royal between big government, one-world liberalism and starve-the-beast, don’t-tread-on-me conservatism that Ross wants, he may well be getting it now.

As for the political viability of this conservatism, I have a pretty good idea what Ross thinks. But considering that Congressional Democrats will now face the temptation — likely insuppressible for them — to indulge all of their worst tendencies, the Cheney-style conservatism that Ross describes may end up being more viable in 2010 or 2012 than he suspects.

Christian Brose is a senior editor at Foreign Policy. He served as chief speechwriter and policy advisor for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to 2008, and as speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2004 to 2005.

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