Mike Gerson, You’re My Hero!

By William D. Aubin | Sunday, June 8, 2008

BOOK REVIEW

Heroic Conservatism
Michael Gerson
HarperOne, 2007

By anybody’s account, the past eight years represent a crossroads for several aspects of the melodrama commonly known as American politics. Almost a decade of the Bush Administration has resulted in an obvious partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans, but perhaps even more striking is the schism that has grown within the Republican party itself. Evangelicals, fiscal conservatives, and proponents of military intervention have coexisted with no small amount of trepidation since Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell left their unique, and not necessarily complementary, impacts on the Grand Old Party. After two terms of an ambitious Republican president, a squabble has erupted among presidential candidates and pundits alike as to the definition of a ‘conservative,’ and what path the Republicans will take in upcoming years. Michael Gerson has opted to enter this discussion both with the unique perspective he gained as the head speechwriter for President Bush, and with his firm belief that the only way for the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to survive is to “Embrace America’s Ideals”—in short, to unequivocally become the party of Michael Gerson.

Forgive, for a moment, the tendency towards populism, “compassionate conservatism,” and the flowery rhetoric of a man who made a career out of highly calculated sentence structures; Heroic Conservatism is valuable because of the narrative at its core. It is the story of the major initiatives and policy decisions of George W. Bush, told by a man who was there for a large part of the process, and whose words were used by the president to relay the information to the American people. The man who brought them into existence explains the intention behind phrases that have become punch lines on late night television. It is unarguably a spin job that is more than a little self-serving, but Gerson succeeds in humanizing the tribulations of George W. Bush Jr. in both triumph and failure. Gerson and Bush both consider themselves conservatives and evangelicals, but the record of the past years shows that the latter influence won against the former in any conflict that arose. To read the justification for increased domestic spending and Bush’s immigration proposals is as intriguing as Gerson’s explanation for the intended meaning of the term “axis of evil.”

The tone and style of Heroic Conservatism make obvious the personality of the author. Michael Gerson is enamored of both the policies he claims to have been key in creating and the words with which President Bush announced them—his own. Repeatedly, Gerson offers an olive branch to liberals, pointing out, rightly, that both the humanitarian necessity of success in Iraq and the escalating expenditures Bush has encouraged in the name of making government ‘work’ instead of cutting expenses across the board are more in tune with the liberal agenda than that of conservatives, and that the president is not deserving of the unprecedented partisan animosity presently evident. In contrast, he comes off dismissively arrogant when referring to the “noble pessimism of traditional conservatism.” Gerson does not go out of his way to explain which of these supposed shortcomings he considers to be the worse influence on American politics. As such, a traditionally pessimistic and narrow-minded ideologue reading along is often lulled into a state of quiescence when well-reasoned arguments against isolationism and tax hikes turn into sanctimonious contempt for the type of Republican who dislikes amnesty for illegal immigrants as much as he dislikes programs that aim to ‘fix’ social problems with new spending.

For the first eight chapters, Gerson’s book is a methodical tale of the events that he witnessed augmented by the words of the speeches he wrote and occasionally complimented by his occasional lapses into preaching. It is important to note that this assessment is not a condemnation of Gerson’s faith or of Christianity per se—rather, the way in which he attempts to chastise all men of faith, that if they have not reached the same conclusion as he on the specific method for dealing with things of concern to a Christian, they are not demonstrating concern or moral conviction. Republicans hesitant to support any spending measure of the past seven years suffer from a lack of “idealism,” or are marked by a “libertarian indifference to the poor.” Dartmouth’s very own Jeffrey Hart catches criticism for his concerns about the impact of Evangelism co-opted for liberal economic measures and class-divide campaigning:

Professor Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth notes with dismay that Bush has ‘brought religion into politics in a way unknown to recent memory.’ He calls that influence ‘populist and radical.’ And he wonders: ‘What exactly was conservative about this form of religious expression, with its roots in the camp revivals?’

Perhaps Gerson should have been wary that the party that has stood for fiscal responsibility and a realistic foreign policy based on both diplomacy and military might be so easily caricatured as the party of those who deny evolution, bomb abortion clinics, and can’t accomplish meaningful immigration reform, instead of denouncing Hart as someone who would probably have supported slavery and child labor.

As the recounting of history reaches the conclusion of Gerson’s time working for the president, he dedicates the final chapter to the persuasion of Republicans. Filled with a sense of eleventh hour urgency akin to that of Al Gore, Gerson details the many historical examples of idealism and moral conviction triumphing over the status quo. He presents thorough descriptions of relativism and historicism, the philosophies in competition with idealism for the minds of conservatives, but makes rather easy arguments against Nazism and fascism instead of addressing the specifics of the modern debate on the direction of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. To listen to Gerson, it would seem as though the majority of the dissenting voices amongst conservatives are godless relativists with no regard for the poor and suffering and a worldview that hasn’t seen optimism in recent memor. It is only at the end of nearly ten pages explaining the ways idealism is superior to fascism that Gerson makes the following rather telling concession:

Most modern and mainstream American conservatives are not skeptical about the existence of moral law. They respect the Declaration, and believe in religious values. But many are deeply skeptical about the ability of government to pursue those ideals.

What Gerson seems unable to understand is that this is not a failure of faith that corrupts otherwise good conservatives, it is considered by the majority to be the valid basis for their political philosophy. The way he writes this off is condescending and represents a failure of understanding for someone who professes to be a Christian:

Since, in this view, all policy is crippled by unintended consequences, since government is a blunt and ineffective instrument, the best course of action is generally inaction. Conservatives should stand athwart history and yell stop. Don’t just stand there; do nothing.

The truth is not as simple as Gerson attempts to portray. “Compassionate conservatives” underestimate the humanity of mainstream conservatives, writing them off as ideologues and elitists. However, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the other conservative leaders of modern history have aimed to solve the same problems that Gerson does, with a different method. The argument that a lack of support for government programs to help the poor or the sick shows a lack of compassion is simply wrong, because a conservative uses the free market and privately run initiatives to push for the same change. Unlike Gerson, conservatives also have the realistic notion to check, when faced with a shortcoming or failure that needs attention, and determine whether or not the problem was caused by mismanagement on the part of a bureaucracy in the first place; more often than not, this is the case.

Several conservative writers and pundits have speculated that Michael Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism is best viewed as a primer on the future of the Republican Party, because of the rise in popularity of class struggle rhetoric and populism and a divide between Evangelicals and fiscal conservatives that grows seemingly by the minute. It is interesting as well because of the remarkable success of Mike Huckabee, a populist Evangelical who tells us that it is more important for government to ‘work’ than for it to be small and that the elites of the party need to give up their ideology and reach out to the working class. Sound familiar?

This review has focused on the problems of populism, ‘compassionate conservatism,’ and what can best be described as Michael Gerson’s solipsism, but Heroic Conservatism is also a tale of a much maligned president who, despite the current mood, may yet be remembered as more good than bad. If Gerson’s factual recountings are to be believed, George W. Bush Jr. is neither evil nor stupid but a man who has run a nation the way he saw fit and based on a specific set of moral guidelines and political ideology. There is much conviction for a conservative to support, just as there are policies that a liberal would have to love if they came from any other source, at any other time. Michael Gerson does not encapsulate conservatism, but the President Bush revealed in this book is one that should not be written off so easily.

Mike Gerson, You’re My Hero!

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