Aaron Welt
Columbia University
It is an exciting time to be a young, progressive politically active person this election year. The rhetoric of change, the electoral games and the seemingly unending coverage is truly dizzying. This excitement has driven some in respectable liberal columns to exhort the very death of the modern conservative movement. Though it may be wishful thinking, this election could be the rebirth of progressive power in American politics.
I will confine this prediction to the economic and foreign policy realms of decision-making, because Christian social conservatism is still very much a palpable force. However, the platform of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain delineates the exhausted state of the American conservatism.
Economically, John McCain could not be more out of touch. As the economy is facing the precipice of recession and homeowners and workers scramble for some government assistance, McCain’s proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. I’m no economist, in fact I’m not even majoring in economics, but the math here is simple. While a family facing foreclosure needs assistance of thousands, possibly tens of thousands of dollars to pay back to banks and rehabilitate their ability to get credit, the Bush tax cuts gave an average of a few hundred dollars to middle and low income Americans. So as the American economy plummets to almost certain recession, McCain’s policy basis is one that proved only mildly effective in the last recession and has led to the largest deficit in US history (in the midst of a war which he is committed to fighting for a century more, but more on that later). McCain’s health care policy focuses on allowing “our companies to effectively compete around the world.” This makes sense considering McCain’s proposal to make the corporate tax rate 25% from 35%, but ignores the obvious fact that American corporations can’t “effectively compete” because in other countries the government carries the burden of health care costs. With the ensuing recession and health care crisis, McCain offers banal, ineffective proposals that have proven disastrous since Reagan first took office.
Of course McCain’s trump card is cutting pork out of the US budget. But in reality this is naïve and potentially harmful. First, according to Jared Bernstein at the American Prospect, removing all those add-on programs from the federal budget amounts to $20-60 billion, which Bernstein points out is a few months of US involvement in Iraq. Additionally, while a lot of pork barrel spending is unnecessary and corrupt, many good programs would die if McCain had his way with them. (I myself took part in high school programs funded by “pork” which were very meaningful and more useful than many functions the government currently partakes in). Cutting pork sounds cool and masculine, but is potentially very foolish.
Finally, the wayward child of the Adams Family of conservatism (neo-conservatism) is truly a death-nail in the coffin Reagan-Bush I-Bush II era conservatism. The War in Iraq is undoubtedly the worst foreign policy decision since Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1965. As polls show more Iraqis wanting the US to leave “immediately” rather than stay John McCain has offered American “blood and treasure” for the next hundred years. He jokingly plays with the idea of invading Iran, an irresponsible and infeasible plan. American involvement in Iraq will not end in 2008, but the neo-conservative influence on American foreign policy almost assuredly will.
The McCain nomination is the embodiment of modern conservatism and its infeasibility in the contemporary world. He is small government even in post-Katrina America. He is internationally pugnacious, even while the US needs to rebuild its stature amongst its allies and engage the world community to tackle serious problems, such as genocide and terrorism. He is socially conservative (i.e. intolerant) even as the GLBT community becomes proudly visible in American life and other new groups, such as Latinos and blacks, become interwoven into middle class American affluence. It may not seem so at times, but the times are a changin’. This election year will prove a vital test for the conservative movement, one I believe they won’t pass, and all for the better.
