Heroic Conservativism Review Part 1: Domestic Policy

Whoa, "compassionate conservativism" actually meant a thing

Politics is like Star Wars movies, in that every decade or so they come out with a new version that makes you go “you know, the old thing I hated wasn’t that bad.”

I recently read Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't), a 2007 book by Michael J. Gerson, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, defending Bush’s conservativism.

My husband told me that none of the ideas in this book were new to him, because he was politically aware in the 2000s. However, I was in elementary and middle school at the time, so all of this is novel to me. If you are older than me, maybe this set of posts will not be so interesting. If you’re my age or younger, let’s get going!¹

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The Republican party in the 2000s had two main schools of thought: libertarianism and Catholicism.² Evangelicalism tended to be too anti-intellectual to contribute much, so intellectually serious evangelicals copied Catholic thought.

A key idea in Catholic political thought is “subsidiarity.” Subsidiarity means that people should be served by the institutions closest to them—their family, their church, their community, charities, and civic associations. Governments don’t create these institutions; the institutions come first.

In Gerson’s view, our liberal political institutions—which protect our rights and give us say in our own destinies—are built on a bedrock of illiberal social institutions, which teach us to obey moral rules. We will not be able to responsibly exercise our freedom unless we’ve been shaped into virtuous individuals by our families, communities, and religions.

In particular, Gerson argues for “principled pluralism.” Of course, he believes, church and state should be separated. But religion is a powerful force for justice. He believes that it is reasonable, under the principle of subsidiarity, to expect people to try to follow God as they understand Him. And he thinks it’s absurd to totally segregate religion from political life: if people are allowed to say that they care about human dignity because they believe in Kant, they should be allowed to say that they care about human dignity because they believe in Jesus.

Under principled pluralism, the government ought to not just refrain from endorsing a specific religion but to actively reach out to everyone of every religion. For example, Bush was the first person to celebrate the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr at the White House. Even atheists can be included under principled pluralism: I was impressed to learn that Bush was noticeably careful to say “good people of every faith and no faith at all.”

According to the principle of subsidiarity, state and federal governments must defer to local institutions whenever possible. The government shouldn’t attempt to solve any problem that can be solved by a church, community, or charity. However, the state and federal governments do have a proper role in strengthening these institutions. In addition, the government must step in when the institution is going against the common good: for example, during Jim Crow or when schools are failing to educate their students.

An example of subsidiarity in action is Bush’s signature Faith-Based And Community Initiative program. People in crisis don’t just need money, Gerson argues, they need love from an actual person who cares about them. A community or religious organization staffed by volunteers does a better job at giving people love than a faceless government bureaucracy does. But these organizations don’t have enough money, especially in inner cities. The federal government’s appropriate role is to give them money so that they can expand in scale, then step back and allow them to preserve their fundamental nature.

One of the big innovations of the Faith-Based And Community Initiative program was that it enabled smaller religious organizations to get money. Large religious organizations, like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, already received government funding. Since religious organizations run by black people tended to be smaller than religious organizations run by white people, Gerson believes that this also served an anti-racist purpose.

Another important principle in Catholic political thought is solidarity. "Solidarity" is the principle that the justice of any society is measured by how it treats the weak and oppressed. It’s not sufficient just to maintain the rule of law; society has a positive obligation to benefit the powerless and suffering. The principle of solidarity is strongly anti-utilitarian. Under the principle of solidarity, we shouldn't sacrifice the powerless to help the powerful, even if it will increase net utility. An example of this principle in action is that one ought not to abort disabled fetuses or kill disabled babies: although taking care of the disabled is costly, it is unacceptable to benefit the average person by sacrificing the weak.³

Gerson is extraordinarily bitter about the outcomes of Bush’s attempts to put subsidiarity and solidarity in action. He writes:

This would not be reassuring to a certain kind of Republican. In these policies, anti-government conservatives have detected a subtle conspiracy. In 1999, candidate George W. Bush proposed expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs—then, as president, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs. He supported an increased federal role to raise standards in public education—then increased the federal role in public education. He attacked the “destructive mind-set” that “if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved”—then refused to get government out of our way so that all our problems could be solved.

After six years assembling the jigsaw puzzle of this consistency, conservative critics have concluded that Bush is a “Christian socialist,” “a Reagan impostor,” and “more compassionate than conservative.” They talk of a “spending orgy” and a government “out of control.” They contend that future political success will require a return to the anti-government purity of the Reagan era—the Golden Age of limited government. And their agenda provides a hint of how that purity is defined: the severe pleasures of cutting food stamps; steep reductions in foreign assistance; paying the costs of Katrina by postponing or ending the Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

In Gerson’s telling, Bush changed less than he wanted to, not because his policies were bad, but because he had to drag the libertarians in his party every inch of the way kicking and screaming. “Can’t we just not spend money and get better outcomes anyway?” they would say. “And if we do have to spend money, can’t we spend it on middle-class people instead? The poors are kind of gross, their poverty is their own fault, and anyway they don’t vote.”

Bush wanted to use Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity for strong anti-poverty measures that would do something about the cycle of poverty in New Orleans. Congressional Republicans, however, wanted to pay for the costs of Katrina by cutting foreign aid and delaying the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They compromised on doing neither, but the process killed Bush’s support among the black religious leaders he’d spent his presidency courting.

And Bush did court black religious leaders. From my perspective in 2023, this book is shockingly anti-racist. "The story of America is largely the story of race”: a thing you can just say in a conservative book written in 2007!

Some of Gerson’s antiracism is just good politics. Black and Latino people tend to be more socially conservative than white Democrats, so in principle the Republicans could peel them off. However, they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, in essence because they don’t trust the Republican Party not to be super racist. Bush’s approach was to reach out to black and Latino leaders and clearly signal his strong opposition to racism. He combined his outreach with a noticeably conservative spin on how to make black and Latino people’s lives better. In addition to the charity point I discussed above, one of his signature issues was improving education by increasing accountability for teachers, which would close the black/white achievement gap. Gerson also suggests various methods of encouraging responsible behavior: for example, the government might match people’s savings or fund mentoring programs for at-risk youth.

But Gerson’s opinions about race aren’t primarily motivated by politics. Gerson is genuinely outraged by racism; many of his most eloquent passages are about the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. He rejects traditional social conservative viewpoints, like the necessity of preserving tradition, because sometimes the tradition is racism and you need to radically change things so you can stop being racist. When he speaks about the role of religion in bringing about justice, the examples he reaches for are Quaker abolitionists and Wilbur Wilberforce.

Reading Heroic Conservativism makes me wistful. I disagree with Gerson’s viewpoints—like, a lot, give me all the faceless government bureaucracies please and thank you, I can find the love on my own—but he’s… nice? We might have different preferred policies, but at least Gerson understands that poverty and racism are bad and that we should set aside the culture war to work on shit that actually matters. In a world where Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign issue is what bathroom I pee in and Trump is Trump, it is refreshing to contemplate a Republican party that cares about phonics and church-run Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs. I might even vote Republican sometimes. Imagine.

Heroic Conservativism: Why Republicans Need To Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve To Lose If They Don’t), by Michael J. Gerson. Published 2008. 320 pages. $9.

1. Before you ask about the torture: next post. We’ll talk about the torture next post.

2. In the modern era, we have added Trumpism.

3. Of course, many forms of utilitarianism are also against killing disabled babies; this is really Peter Singer’s hobbyhorse and not general to the philosophy.