By Bill Evitts
Buffalo, NY – For over 70 years now, the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have been defined principally around the role of government. Liberals pushed for activist government. Conservatives stood for keeping government non-intrusive and cheap. This split animated the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, War on Poverty, environmental policy debates and the Civil Rights movement.
Without our noticing it, however, this frame of debate -- activist government versus leave-us-alone -- has pretty much run its course.
It is over because in the 21st century, with nearly 300 million people in our country, all sides now embrace activist government. Today's political debate is not about the existence of federal intervention. It's about its uses.
Conservatives today push for an activist governmental agenda as loudly as liberals. Sure, George Bush dismisses "top-down governmental control from Washington," but that's just rhetorical posture. Way back in the Reagan years conservatives began trying to use government aggressively to advance a social agenda. Three times in that decade, for example, they proposed constitutional amendments to declare English the country's official language, and thereby use federal power to combat multicultural diversity. Currently, conservatives want to use the constitution itself to control a matter that has never, ever been the federal government's business -- the terms of marriage.
Marriage has always been under the civil jurisdiction of the states. But now conservatives, traditionally champions of states' rights, are launching a national campaign for the federal government to take over marriage. Indeed, today's activist conservatives want government to regulate private behavior in a way old-style small-government conservatives like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater would have found appalling.
We long ago left behind the question whether to regulate industry. Now we tussle over how we regulate industry, who controls the process, and what the federal government in its top-down way should or should not do to promote and stimulate business. Business is no longer asking to be left alone; it is demanding to be supported and subsidized by government policy - as it has been at least since Chrysler was bailed out with government dollars in the 70's.
Federal tax debates are no longer about taxing or not, pro-tax liberals versus anti-tax conservatives. The real issue is how the tax system is structured, who wins and who loses.
The late Senator Patrick Moynihan once brilliantly noted that the "central truth" of conservatism is that culture, not politics, determines a society's success. The central truth of liberalism, on the other hand, is that politics can change the culture, and save a society from itself. That was very insightful.
But if we apply Moynihan's insight to politics today, we see that the familiar debates are outmoded. The culture has been moving in a way conservatives don't like - as in treating homosexuality as a ho-hum mainstream phenomenon, for example, or restricting religion in the public sphere. So like liberals of old battling segregation, conservatives want to engage the power of the federal government to change the culture and save it from itself -- Moynihan's shrewd description of liberalism.
Well, if we're all in accord over government activism, what now separates liberals and conservatives?
I think the new definitions of conservative and liberal are coalescing around what we've come to call the culture wars -- such things as the proper role of religion in public affairs, how to cope with multiculturalism and race, shifting morality in popular culture, removing the barriers for homosexuals, and so on. This cultural schism explains our split into blue and red states, rural versus urban, coastal versus central, and the rise of minority conservatism. It also explains the unease in the right wing between the old and new brands of conservatism.
Conservatives now embrace governmental activism because things they don't like are ascendant, and they want the government to intervene, just as liberals did when the norms of society ran against them all those years.
Once we see that we've left the old political model behind, we'll come to grips with the real issues. We'll be able to debate each other in terms that make more sense. We'll understand what politicians are really arguing about -- which is almost never a principled debate about taking away the federal big stick. It's really about deciding who's going to get hit.
Listener-commentator Bill Evitts is senior director of Development and Communications at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.