Is This the Last Republican Bullet?

As House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert struggled last week to keep his restive troops in line behind the Republican plan for a 10-year phased reduction in taxes, there was a note of desperation in his appeals. What GOP members were being asked to do was not simply to spare their leader the embarrassment of a defeat on the House floor but to preserve what may be the only remaining consensus element in Republican ideology: the belief in limited government. Much like Marxists desperately trying to preserve the dogma of the class struggle in the face of changed circumstances, conservative Republicans in the House hoped to breathe life into now-unfashionable connection between low taxes and their cherished belief in limited government.

Inasmuch as taxes are the fuel on which federal programs operate, cutting off that source of energy will quickly curtail the activities of bureaucrats, regulators and those who wish to expand the scope of government. A generous supply of revenues, according to this reasoning, will lead the feds into mischief. In the extreme case, a federal establishment too lavishly endowed with money will become an instrument of oppression.

Time is out of joint for this kind of argument. The reduction itself will add little to the wallets of ordinary Americans. If assembly-line workers in Detroit are getting all the overtime they can handle keeping up with demand for sport utility vehicles, the paltry few hundred dollars that the tax-cut would provide annually does not stir much enthusiasm. And whatever alarm might be raised about the mischievous purposes of Washington are easily turned aside by Democrats invoking the needs of America’s schools and the looming problems of providing health care and security for the elderly and children. Add to this inauspicious public mood the scornful comments of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and you have to wonder why Hastert felt compelled to call in all of his chips. The answer has more to do with the spiritual state of American conservatism than it does with econometric theory.

Republican conservatives, the dominant faction of the party in Congress, now look as uneasily upon the surge of Texas Gov. George W. Bush as did many old-line Marxists upon the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. Indeed, the Republican counterpart of Gorbachev’s glasnost may well be Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

As Marxists venerated the class struggle as the cardinal element in their philosophy, certain elements have been central in the conservative cosmos. For economic conservatives, it is free markets and a light regulatory touch by the federal government. For social conservatives, it is public morality. To this latter group, the Bush message is most unsettling. Some of them, such as long-time commentator and activist Paul Weyrich, have struck their colors and declared the culture wars lost. They look upon gestures such as the constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration as little more than a mild anodyne for the discomfort over what many see as more important reverses of public sentiment on immigration, gay rights and the traditional family. It is, then, of paramount importance that a shred of unifying dogma be preserved. That is found in a tax cut.

The hope is that in the House tax bill there will be sustenance for all of the elements of the party. For those concerned about passing on substantial legacies to their heirs, there is an estate-tax provision. For those fearful of the disintegration of family values, there is the elimination of the so-called marriage penalty. And for those who look upon President Clinton’s declaration that “the era of big government is over” as nothing more than a clever ruse, there is the vision of a diminished flow of revenue from the pockets of Americans to the distended purse of the federal government.

Valiant though the effort was, the tax cut, whatever its fate, will do little to relieve the anxieties of those on the right who fear a Bush-engineered perestroika in the offing. The Texas governor and the party’s leading presidential hopeful may be correct in his desire to remove from the party the tag of mean-spiritedness and misanthropy that has been hung on it, but many of the GOP’s faithful still cling to the oldtime religion and believe that the biblical injunction about rendering unto Caesar has less to do with money than it does morality.