Liberals have been suffering from conservative envy for several years now. The liberal Center for American Progress was founded explicitly to be the leftâs answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The lefty radio network Air America was launched to copy Rush Limbaugh & co.âs success. Deeppocketed liberals are scrambling to copy conservative foundations, even though liberal foundations have always had more money. Most conservatives I know snicker at all this. Itâs not that talk radio, think tanks and foundations havenât been essential to the rise of American conservatism in the last five decades. They have been. But liberals are emphasizing hardware because they donât want to question the validity of their very outdated software.
Look: Conservatives would love to switch places with liberals. Weâd get the universities, Hollywood, the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Pew Foundations, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, CBS, etc., while liberals would get the Washington Times and Fox News and the few conservative foundations left. And that sort of makes the point. Not only does the left have better stuff, but theyâve also got plenty of mechanisms to âget their message out.â Megaphones matter, but not as much as what you say into them.
If liberals really want to emulate conservative successes, I have some advice for them: Get into some big, honking arguments â not with conservatives, but with each other. The history of the conservative movementâs successes has been the history of intellectual donnybrooks, between libertarians and traditionalists, hawks and isolationists, so-called neocons and so-called paleocons. Liberals would be smart to copy that and stop worrying how to mimic our direct-mail strategies. Liberals have a tendency to confuse political tactics for political principles and vice versa. Exhibit A is the leftâs fascination with âunity.â Unity is often useful in politics, but itâs often a handicap if you havenât figure out what to be unified about. Just as the Socratic method leads to wisdom, big fights not only illuminate big ideas, but they force people to become invested in them. Unfortunately, liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.
Of course there are arguments on the left and there are individual liberals with deepseated convictions and principles. But most of the arguments are about how to âbuild a movementâ or how to win elections, not about what liberalism is. Even the âget out of Iraq nowâ demands from the base of the Democratic Party arenât grounded in anything like a coherent foreign policy. Ten years ago, liberals championed nation-building. Now they call it imperialism because George W. Bush is doing it.
Hereâs an example: The Hoover Institution recently issued two books edited by Peter Berkowitz, âVarieties of Conservatism in Americaâ and âVarieties of Progressivism in America.â Each contain thoughtful essays by leading conservatives and liberals. But the conservatives defend different ideological philosophical schools â neoconservatism, traditionalism, etc. The liberals, meanwhile, argue almost exclusively about which tactics Democrats should embrace to win the White House.
Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president elected to two terms since Franklin Roosevelt. One of the reasons for his success was that he was willing to pick fights with his own party. One can argue about the sincerity of some of those fights. But we remember the Sista Souljah moment for a reason.
Right now, Washington is marveling at how the Democratic Party has simultaneously made the Iraq war the central and defining political issue of the decade while at the same time having no clue what it is they want to do about it. Worse, itâs looking increasingly like the Democratsâ position on the war is based largely on the polls, not principles. One of the most important events in the rise of conservatism was the 1978 Firing Line debate over U.S. control of the Panama Canal. William F. Buckley favored giving it up. The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, favored keeping it. Reaganâs side lost the argument, in Congress at least, but conservatives once again demonstrated our willingness to duke it out on such issues. And Reaganâs career hardly suffered. If liberals were smart, theyâd do something similar. Have Joe Lieberman debate Nancy Pelosi or John Murtha. Make liberals get past their
passion and explore what they think. My guess is it would be good for liberalism in the long run â and even better for America.
Examiner columnist Jonah Goldberg is editor at large at the National Review Online and a syndicated
columnist.