by Maisie Allison
Sam Tanenhaus argues that "legislative" conservatism has reemerged in the wake of imperial or "presidential" conservatism's ugly demise:
Today’s Republican legislators, and the Tea Party faction that drives them, are indifferent as a group to foreign policy and distrustful of any and all presidential initiatives. That a Democrat now occupies the White House, and initially urged major reforms, has only hardened opposition on the right to a powerful executive. Even the specter of Reagan has receded. It is instead Goldwater’s dogma that resonates, his declaration (in 1960) that “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. … My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”
Tanenhaus makes a compelling case, but unfortunately I find it hard to believe that a Republican would actually concede executive power, especially on foreign policy. At this point the latest incarnation of legislative conservatism seems less like a deep-rooted philosophical sea change and more like a crude political strategy that makes use of the branch Republicans half-control (it is telling that legislative conservatism's policy of obstructionism failed to check Obama on Libya). From James Lamond's response to Peter Beinart's eulogy:
[N]eoconservativism never had a wide political base, electoral force or popular movement behind it. As Vaisse writes, “nobody ever got elected on a ‘neoconservative platform.’” George W. Bush famously ran in 2000 pledging a “modest” foreign policy. As Beinart rightly points out, for what they have said about foreign policy thus far, the GOP presidential candidates tend towards the “modest” George Bush of 2000, versus the George Bush of 2003. But this is probably as much attributable the lack of a Tea Party foreign policy and a lack of a coherent world view from the broader GOP as anything else. And as Jake wrote earlier this month, Rick Perry — a Tea Party candidate — is being advised by Donald Rumsfeld, Doug Feith and Dan Blumenthal, all either widely considered neocons or longtime allies.
Basically, neoconservatism's global agenda persists even as the U.S. abandons the unpopular project of nation-building abroad. And as Lamond and Beinart suggest, there's already evidence of a new foreign emergency-boogeyman emerging in China (note that the American defense budget exceeds China's by sixfold). Yesterday Perry tentatively decried "military adventurism," adding that the U.S. "must renew [its] commitment to taking the fight to the enemy wherever they are before they strike at home" (Daniel Foster writes: "[T]he debate on the Right at the moment is, very roughly speaking, between the Bush Doctrine and good ol’ fashioned realism, and Perry certainly sounds like he’s trying to help himself to both"). In other words, if a Republican president is elected, expect a sudden revival of imperial conservatism.
The Dish 