Yes, Tom, there was Conservative thought before Reagan. Consider the work of Reinhold Neibuhr (1892-1971).
After youthful dalliance with Marxism and the Communist Party USA, Rieinhold Niebuhr, a German Evangelical theologian from Missouri, and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1948(!), became one of the radical Left’s and nascent Peace Movement’s harshest critics. So naturally both liberals and foreign policy conservatives battle to claim his legacy.
During the 1950s, after witnessing the horrors of Nazi Germany and the iron fist of Communism, he postulated that evil demanded opposition by force, even by Christians. This provided historical grounding for President Reagan’s staunch anti-communism and George W. Bush’s description of the Axis of Evil and the need to confront evil doers. Neibuhr forever searched for a form of Democracy that would empower people instead of those holding power over others.
Neibuhr’s ideas still resonate in the citadels of power as John McCain calls him a paragon of clarity while Barack Obama lists Neibuhr as his favorite social philosopher. Most important are Niebuhr’s contributions to what is known as “political realism” that acknowledges “the impossibility of human perfection.”
Prior to recent events and the advent of the Obama administration, we were sorely reminded of the failure of markets. Why even the high priest of low interest rates, Alan Greenspan, almost cried before a Congressional hearing when he admitted that the godhead of free market capitalist theory, the rational man, did not act rationally, but with greed and avarice. And the Left rubbed the viscera of the failure of the god of business in the face of Americans.
But what goes round, comes round as government is also incapable of perfection. As now we come full circle, for once again, the Obama Administration and an unrestrained Congress is letting loose the kind of chaos that only government with no limits other than itself can befall a people.
Not to put too Augustinian a point on the matter, but yes, there is evil that both men and institutions perpetuate. Even that of markets and government.
The Framers of this country knew this fact, too. It’s called limited constitutional government with rule of law—not the mob, with a balance of powers, check and balances, and the Bill of Rights; starting with the First Amendment and culminating in Tenth, while protected by the Second.
The Left has nagged and scolded the nation about the danger of rampant individualism and corporate greed. But just wait til Americans gets a close look at government gone berserk in the 21st Century. Soon, the wheel will turn and America will want to have a new conversation about political realism—especially concerning the imperfectability of government.
Endnote: Niebuhr was presented with the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1964 and wrote the Serenity Prayer in 1943.
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The need is for a dynamic dialectic (or probably better a quantum of politics) of sort with a shifting back and forth around a broad spectrum of approaches that allows for a combination of those aspects of both progressive and regressive ideas to be tried. The problem we face is that there is an extension of the extreme swings by the development of techniques *such as the 2/3 financial blockage in California State politics, so that the amount of force that builds up to affect what should be a moderate change becomes immense and then there is an over run until the counter wave forces build up.
What we have lost in California is the respect for the moderation and experimentation of many small steps in favor of Great Leap Forward or Backward steps. Both sides…therein may be the problem: there are two sides-not many sides and not many voices in the middle that are willing to sustain themselves against accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ for trying something this way or the other to see if it WORKS.
This is not conservative or liberal thinking, this is a American common sense thinking.