Op-Ed
From Trunks to Tails
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My room is overrun with donkeys.
(And, no, Dear Reader, don’t worry: that line, to be sure, is not just a product of your imagination, the source of which is doubtlessly still recovering from a Spring Break spent in places where umbrellas are available only in toothpick form.)
My room is truly — literally — overrun with donkeys.
Before President Skorton sends the fine folks at Facilities Management my way, however, I should mention that my donkeys are not your average burros; rather, these jacks and jennies — in a move that is wont to make their more numerous brown and gray brethren a little jealous from time to time — tend to come in red, white and blue, and most are covered in stars.
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The fact that this particular variation of Equus asinus plays so prominently in my choice of décor speaks, of course, to more than my aesthetic sensibilities: it makes clear that your humble columnist is, as I have proclaimed in many a past parlance, a Democrat (and mighty proud of it).
But there’s a twist — and it’s one that has been the cause of much confusion in the minds of my friends on both sides of the aisle.
This particular member of America’s oldest political party, you see, is also a conservative. Surprised? Don’t be. Far from what the current crop of Republicans in Washington would have you and me and everyone else believe, I argue that this is anything but a contradiction.
I was somewhere around 14-years-old when I made my first foray into politics; it was the year 2000, and my governor was running for president. Inspired both by him and the particulars of his platform, I joined the Northeast Texas Republican Assembly, becoming its youngest active member. The GOP, I thought, could not have asked for a more perfect candidate.
“Look,” then-Governor Bush said in his first debate with opponent Al Gore, “I fully recognize I’m not of Washington. I’m from Texas. [...] I have a proud record of working with both Republicans and Democrats, which is what our nation needs. Somebody that can come to Washington and say, ‘Let’s forget all the finger pointing and get positive things done on Medicare, prescription drugs, Social Security’....”
Dubya promised to bring an end to the excesses of the Clinton era — moral and otherwise — and put America back on a (compassionate) conservative track.
I loved it.
The real kicker for me (and, quite probably, thousands of others), however, was candidate Bush’s approach to foreign policy.
“I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” the future president shot at his Democratic contender in yet another of their debates. “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations.”
To this starry-eyed junior high kid, at least, such rhetoric seemed to indicate that a vote for Bush and the party he represented would be a vote for realism, a vote to return to that quintessentially conservative way of dealing with the world as it is (a la Henry Kissinger) instead of recklessly seeking to use American might to change it first into what we think it ought to be (a la Madeleine Albright).
Turns out, however, that this starry-eyed junior high kid was wrong about that vote (sorry, Mom), and on more than the foreign policy front: the actions of the self-proclaimed compassionate conservative realist I went to bat for would largely prove to be anything but compassionate, anything but conservative and anything but realistic.
In October of last year, Peggy Noonan, a veteran of both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, echoed this charge in The Wall Street Journal, slamming the president for “chang[ing] the modern governing definition of ‘conservative.’ ”
“The conservative tradition on foreign affairs,” she wrote, “is prudent realism; the conservative position on borders is that they must be governed; the conservative position on high spending is that it is obnoxious and generationally irresponsible.” Etc.
“This is not,” she concluded, “how Mr. Bush has governed.”
Far from it. But the blame does not rest with Bush alone; after all, had the Republicans in Congress held their man in the Executive Branch to his campaign promises and forced the erstwhile conservative to govern according to the tenets of the philosophy that put him there, we might not be where we — the United States — are today.
The catch, of course, is that such a task would have required congressional GOPers to have the strength of their convictions, something that they made clear they lacked from the start. Rather than rein in the president, the leaders of the Republican-dominated legislature did just the opposite, instead disciplining any of the rank and file who dared question the dictates coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was at this point that I noticed something about the group of people that made up the opposition: they ran the ideological gamut from liberal to conservative and had personalities as varied as California progressive Nancy Pelosi and Texas traditionalist Charlie Stenholm. They, the Democrats, seemed a truly national party, one in which every kind of American had a voice in government.
To make a long story short, not too many months would pass before I tired of trying to restrain what, by then, had become an altogether stray elephant, deciding to continue my political trek while riding its much more dependable (and cuddlesome) counterpart. But this was not because I had given up on conservatism. To be sure, it was precisely because I continued to believe so strongly in it that I made my switch.
I found, in the end, that I would much rather defend the merits of that philosophy in a party made up of both conservatives and liberals than to stay in a party that had proven itself willing — for whatever reason — to distort the Burkean tradition to the point that not even Edmund Burke himself could recognize it
Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu. If You Can Keep It appears Thursdays.