David Strom, The Daily Record Newswire
Liberals usually have the upper hand when it comes to discussing aspirations and goals for governmental action - and, for that matter, with expressing values-based statements in general.
There is a simple reason for that: When you focus solely on the aspiration and ignore the possibility or potential cost of achieving a goal, it makes being persuasive pretty easy.
Who wouldn't want to live in what amounts to a utopia?
Conservatives are conservative because they are skeptical of utopian promises; they are acutely aware of limits, trade-offs and unintended consequences.
This often makes them sound crabby, uncaring, and ungenerous. They often come off as arguing against all things bright and beautiful. Politically, it is surprising that conservatives are a force politically at all.
Britain's Winston Churchill in 1939 is a classic case in point. He saw the coming war in Europe and warned against complacency and appeasement of Nazi Germany. Worse, he asked his country to prepare for a war that nobody wanted to fight.
Britons put their faith in Neville Chamberlain because he promised "peace in our time," which is unsurprisingly more attractive. Chamberlain believed that the obstacles to achieving peace were under the control of his actions, and hence any failure to achieve peace was a failure on the part of diplomacy.
Churchill, of course, became prime minister, and not because his promises were better than Chamberlain's. What he offered was infinitely worse. In his speech to Parliament upon assuming the prime minister's post, he promised "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" - and he followed with policies that delivered precisely that. Those policies delivered a world not of utopia, but one far better than the alternative.
What stymied Chamberlain was a reality the limits over which he had no control. What made Churchill a great prime minister was that he was able to steer events because he understood and confronted reality. It was a hard, even devastating reality, but he was able to lead Britain through the valley of death precisely because he refused to ignore the brutal truth.
Today's Neville Chamberlains is Barack Obama, who has steered his charges into unnecessary dangers because he has refused to confront the reality that stares him plainly in the face.
Time and again Obama has declared by fiat that a certain course will result in dramatic and positive results. He believed that a new posture toward the Middle East as embodied in his Cairo speech would somehow turn radical Islamists into allies. Instead, the Middle East is less secure than it has been since World War II - and the threats of terrorists are perhaps greater than at any time in recent memory.
Obama promised that the passage of his signature "Affordable Care Act" would deliver more secure, more affordable, and better health care and insurance. Instead, it has created a mess the scope of which we still cannot fathom.
In short, the result has not been the utopia he promised. Instead it has led to greater, not less, health care insecurity; higher, not lower, insurance costs; fewer, not more, people being insured by their employers; and more, not less, anxiety for everyday people.
Don't take my word for it - consult every survey done since Obamacare has passed. The American people don't like it because it does not and cannot do what was promised.
Conservatives certainly have not been immune to the siren song of utopian ideals. George W. Bush succumbed to them when he argued (and believed) that displacing dictators in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to liberal democratic reforms.
The costs of that failure to confront reality have been enormous.
Reality is often harsh. Limits to our power to change it are usually substantial. Pretending or saying that this is not the case actually harms, not helps, us.
Aspirations and promises of a better world untethered by an appreciation of the limits we have to actually achieve those goals aren't harmless or charming - they are dangerous and dispiriting.
Millions of people paid a high price for Chamberlain's failure to understand the dangers Europe faced in 1939, and millions of people have paid a price for believing that Obama could push the "reset" button on our relations with our adversaries, or easily rework one-sixth of our economy.
The irony is that conservatives sometimes often sound harsh to people who believe that the world is especially malleable to human will. Conservatives' fear of unintended consequences can come off as cramped lack of concern for or generosity toward people's suffering today.
It's not.
Rather, conservatives believe that reality rarely bends easily to our will, if at all. Social engineering promises much, but more often than not what it delivers is disaster.
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David Strom is a senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment.
Published: Fri, Sep 26, 2014
