Party of Denial

What has happened to the Republican Party? This question is already on the minds of many Republicans as we head into the final stretch of this election cycle and is sure to explode into a frenzy of scapegoating and finger-pointing after our party receives its expected trouncing in November. So far, however, few conservative commentators have offered an explanation that I find convincing, largely because they are still in a “state of denial,” so to speak, about the depth of the party’s (and the nation’s) problems.

Wishful thinking has blamed current ills on pork, former Rep. Mark Foley, the immigration and Social Security impasses, lobbyists, and the like—effectively everything except for the party’s ill-advised and disastrous foreign policy, the true cause of Republican misfortunes. Unless the Republican Party acknowledges the problems with its post-9/11 foreign policy and returns to its rational, restrained roots, either it will die out, as Americans refuse to trust it any longer at the helm of our country, or it will overextend our military so much that our efforts to preserve peace and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons will collapse.

The Republican Party has not always sought to deliver democracy through the barrel of a gun. In fact, right up until 9/11, it would be fair to say that it was almost overly averse to any form of military intervention in the domestic affairs of other nations. Most Republicans, for example, opposed America’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 90s, humanitarian operations that involved no clear American interests. While I support both interventions, they are great examples of former Republican military restraint.

Or consider this incredible quote from then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, in a 1992 speech to the Discovery Institute in Seattle: “[T]he question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”

Things have changed a lot, and not for the better.

It appears that the Bush administration arrived at the faulty conclusion that our old tendency to engage in a foreign policy that was literally conservative—that sought to preserve the balance of the international order by keeping other countries from disrupting it and pursued only incremental change—no longer applies in the post-9/11 world or that we do not have the luxury of this comparatively slow and methodical strategy. So it adopted nearly the opposite foreign policy, one that is inherently radical, seeking to overturn the existing world order and build a new one from what is left over. (To be fair, it has certainly succeeded in reducing Iraq to its constituent parts.)

A more appropriate and conservative response to 9/11 would have realized that when the government addresses a problem, it needs to do so in the most direct and efficient way possible in order to minimize the cost to citizens in taxes, inconveniences, and, in this case, blood. While some of the administration’s actions conformed to this principle—shutting down Afghanistan’s terrorist camps through military force and initiating intelligence reform—a sense of self-importance led the administration to embark on a very indirect, inefficient, and decades-long campaign to rid the world of despotic governments and radical Islam and install democratic regimes where either is found.

Conservatives have always considered this sort of vague, unaccountable government mandate, based on the hunches and grand visions of government officials, to be inherently dangerous. After all, even if Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction, we still would not have been prepared to replace the Ba’ath Party, prevent Iran from being emboldened by the power vacuum in Iraq, or retain enough troops to threaten North Korea. There were better options available, yet Republicans committed the country to this experiment with enthusiasm.

A more fundamental and longer-term problem is that in the process the administration has been enabled by the progressive surrender of the political, intellectual, and emotional independence of both the conservative base and Congressional Republicans. President George W. Bush may have made the bad decisions, but he has been enabled by what you might call the Hannitizing of the party base and legislators—the nearly conscious willingness to become so indoctrinated that the facts begin to matter less than the party line interpretation of those facts, such that one forsakes the ends for which one initially joined the party in order to support the party as an end in itself.

It is sickening—like the conservative version of “Animal Farm.” We are letting our leader rewrite the history of what happened in 2003 so that it paints him in the best possible light today and obscures the disasters of the present by constantly spinning the truth through surrogates. These are the sorts of party tactics that one would expect in a communist country, not in a democracy where we—especially conservatives—expect our government to be open and honest with us and accountable for its actions.

Forget immigration, lobbyists, and even pages—this is the real story of how we became everything that we hated in 1994. Worst of all, most Republicans won’t even acknowledge that the problem exists. Let’s hope November is a really loud wake-up call.

Stephen E. Dewey ’07 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House, currently on voluntary leave, and a former president of the Harvard Republican Club.