Always right, never wrong

LAST WEEK, I wrote that conservatives think they have “won the war of ideas” when, in fact, they have simply reduced their ideas to a few simple bromides. There’s also another reason why conservatives have such misplaced confidence in the superiority of their beliefs: They refuse to ever question them.

Liberal writer Rick Pearlstein explained this recently when he appeared at a conference on conservatism. “In conservative intellectual discourse, there is no such thing as a bad conservative,” he said. “Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.” So whenever conservative policies crash and burn in the real world, rather than rethink their ideas, conservatives simply redefine the failures as un-conservative.

A perfect example is President Bush’s habit of simultaneously cutting taxes and jacking up spending. For a couple of years now, conservatives have objected to this profligacy. The whole thrust of the effort has been to paint Bush as un-conservative. As my colleague and fellow Times columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote on these pages a few weeks ago, “[Bush’s] big first-term domestic initiatives -- aside from tax cuts -- were an education bill cosponsored by Ted Kennedy, campaign finance ‘reform’ favored by the sensible-shoes types and the biggest expansion in entitlements (prescription drug benefits) since the Great Society.”

Conservative pundit Bruce Bartlett has a forthcoming book titled “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” His central argument is that Bush’s economic record is un-conservative. Whatever goes wrong as a result of Bush’s policies, conservatives can get off scot-free: It wasn’t us that bankrupted the country, your honor. It was that moderate Bush!

The problem is that President Bush has been slavishly following the conservative lead on economics. Bush’s father, remember, signed a budget deal in 1990 that slashed hundreds of billions of dollars in spending, but he had to accept a small tax hike on the rich in order to get it. Conservatives rose up in revolt. Their message was: Low taxes matter more than low spending.

Conservative apparatchik Stephen Moore once said: “Low taxes are the central linchpin of conservatism. We always say it’s possible to disagree about abortion, gay rights, the proper level of Americorps funding or military spending, but we can’t disagree about our one unifying message as conservatives.”

George W. Bush got this message loud and clear. Conservatives rallied behind him as their standard bearer because he promised deep tax cuts. That he implicitly opposed deep spending cuts -- with his talk of “compassion” and scorn for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor” -- and explicitly promised a prescription drug benefit was perfectly fine.

Conservatives didn’t accept this strategy because they had no choice. They accepted it because they thought it would work. They grumbled about the spending but believed that slashing taxes would “starve the beast” and force down spending. Conservatives were never very clear on just how this mechanism would work, and it hasn’t. (They like to talk about “cutting the government’s allowance,” but that doesn’t work when the government can borrow all the money it wants.) Rather than reexamine their failed strategy, they’re simply writing Bush out of conservatism.

Liberals have had plenty of failures too -- welfare, hostility toward the military, racial quotas, etc. But while liberals have responded to failures with fierce internal debates, conservatives have responded to theirs by casting the deviationists from their midst. No wonder they think they’ve never been wrong.