Why I'm a Republican

My oldest daughter, let's call her Miss Potomac, Sr., asked me two pointed questions this morning on the way to school. First, what's a neo-conservative? Second, why are you one?

I've got a checkered political past. My first political involvement was to hang a Mondale-Ferraro sign on my dorm window as an undergrad. My second political involvement was to be a volunteer on the campaign of a Republican senator from my home state. Go figure.

I gradually got myself straightened out politically when three central themes became fixed points in my political decision making. I'm one of those compassionate conservatives with a strong belief in the dignity of the human person, and it just so happens that that particular concern extends to women and their unborn children. Democrats were caught in the grip of an individual rights mania that made reasonable discussion impossible. Second, and by extension, I'd like to see poor Americans get off the islands of poverty they inhabit and join the mainstream of American life. To be sure, poor Americans own a large share in their own problems but still, it would be nice if we organized our relief efforts in such a way that maximized the chance to empower as many as possible. One of my main beefs with the Democratic party was its resolute insistence that, since American society was so unjust, it didn't matter whether our anti-poverty programs worked as long as we spent more money every year to salve our consciences. Results matter, I decided, more than the moral satisfaction of punishing American taxpayers with programs that wasted their money.

Finally, and I'm late-comer to this issue, national security. Apropos the above discussion about the guilty nature of American society, for many years I shared a wide-spread belief among Democrats of the moral equivalency between American society and the Soviet Union. The Soviet system couldn't be thought of as worse; that was moral imperialism. On the other hand, there was no degree of self-criticism that was excessive for a right-thinking liberal to direct toward his own country. I shook most of this off in the late-1980s and early 1990s but it was completely stripped away by the events of September 11, 2001. America is an exceptional and an essential nation and the world would, and will, be much worse off without us. Whatever the problems with our system, and there are many, they pale to insignificance when one imagines a world without us left to the tender mercies of the Chinese, North Koreans, Russians and Iranians. Order is a tenuous thing and we are the Federal Reserve of order and security.

There it is. My complete political philosophy to date. It serves me well.