Conservatives With Pink Cheeks

Joe Scarborough stands athwart history, yelling "slow down."

Nick Gillespie from the October 2009 issue

The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise, by Joe Scarborough, New York: Crown Forum Publishers, 271 pages, $26

Given how the last eight or so years have worked out for them in far-flung battlefields and domestic ballot boxes, you’d think that conservatives in general and Republicans in particular would be pretty gun-shy about war rhetoric. But here’s Joe Scarborough, a former GOP Florida congressman, letting it rip in The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise: “Congressional leaders  will…need to take a more prudent path on the environment by declaring war on foreign oil.”

And in case you’re wondering, just saying no to such a glorious future is not an option. “Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Libertarian or a Marxist, understand that it is historically inevitable that the ‘Age of Conservatism’ is coming soon,” writes Scarborough, the Hegelian author of Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day (2004). “The winds of history provide us no other choice.” 

If this book is indeed the last best hope of conservatism and America’s promise, well, it was nice knowing you. Scarborough offers not a choice but an echo of the Bush-Obama status quo regarding everything from bailouts to stimulus spending to rendition policy. He unwittingly tells us that conservatives can at best stand athwart history yelling “slow down” but can’t fundamentally change its direction.

Scarborough is the host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, the most consistently engaging morning talk show on cable television. His co-host, Mika Brzezinski, and a stable of regulars that includes the plagiarist Mike Barnicle and the John Demjanjuk enthusiast Pat Buchanan are a genuinely spirited crew who discuss and debate the news of the day with a rare mixture of conviction, knowledge, and humor. Compared with, say, Fox & Friends, Scarborough’s show is the Algonquin Round Table on steroids, or at least Vivarin.

Yet The Last Best Hope is less a serious manifesto than a breezy bull session. Scarborough argues that rightwingers seeking to recapture Ronald Reagan’s box office mojo need to embrace environmentalism (they should be “going green for God”); acknowledge the permanence of troubled entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (“everyone is going to have to give until it hurts”); and pursue a humble foreign policy (except when they don’t: “Most Republicans, including myself, were steadfast in their support for the war” in Iraq). 

On contentious social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, Scarborough writes, the heirs to Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. should push for decisions to be made at the state level—not necessarily because localized decision making provides better answers but because “that is the only way to protect the advances conservatives have made over the past generations.” Most of all, Scarborough counsels, conservatives need to channel their inner Gipper by “following the advice of Jesus and the example of Reagan, by trying more often to turn the other cheek” during fractious policy debates.

This may be sound strategy, but such sentiments certainly don’t provide an alternative to the surplus of centralized solutions emanating from Washington, at least sinceGeorge W. Bush and a Republican
Congress championed the Medicare prescription drug benefit, passed No Child Left Behind, and created the enormous Department of Homeland Security.

Scarborough dedicates his book “to conservatives of all parties,” in homage to the Nobel Prize–winning economist F.A. Hayek, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom was dedicated “to the socialists of all parties.” If he were interested in pointing out a truly different direction, Scarborough would have done well to read another Hayek text. In his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek noted that conservatism is a reactionary impulse that “by its very nature cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.” At most, Hayek said, it might succeed in “slowing down undesirable developments.”

Hayek pushed a decentralist, libertarian line instead, because he believed that none of us has a monopoly on truth or knowledge and that “to live and work successfully with others requires…an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which… others are allowed to pursue different ends.” In such thoughts is the beginning of a very different political program, one that might go much farther in restoring “America’s promise” than supporting, as Scarborough did when he served in Congress, “increased funding for school lunch programs by 4 percent instead of 6 percent.”

Nick Gillespie ([e-mail]) is editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com. A version of this review ran in The New York Times.

Comments

|9.29.09 @ 7:48AM|#

The other thing that Mr. Scarborough's view refuses to take into account: the inability of the government to provide for every desire of the electorate.

Sure, the government can promise the people the moon, and the people can follow the lure of "free money" from Big Government types in both of the two main parties, but that doesn't mean anything to reality.

Did you ever hear the old yarn about William Bryan Jennings, from his campaign in 1896 (I think)? "The people of Kansas are for free silver, I am for free silver! We'll work out the details later."

It doesn't matter how many Americans get together and vote for the impossible. The will of the majority does NOT have the power to make the impossible possible.

We cannot afford the welfare state in perpetuity. Simple.

Turning the other cheek in the health care debate wouldn't have stopped that monstrosity called HR 3200 from getting passed... Someone in this country has to stand for reason, and you cannot trust the people in power to be that guy.

|9.29.09 @ 9:19AM|#

Me thinks me smells a 2016 run.

Since this guy hasn't met a principle that he can't waffle on, he'll fit right in as the perfect Republican Establishment candidate.

|9.29.09 @ 9:51AM|#

Scarborough is MSNBC's idea of fair and balanced.

|9.29.09 @ 9:57AM|#

Scarborough is one of those no balls, gives a gracious concession speech Democrats love.

I love it how he calls on Regean now that Regean is dead. When Regean was alive, Scarborough would have been one of those people calling his economic plan vodoo economics and saying he is a war monger. Scarborough not only doens't have any balls, he hates anyone that does. Reagan, although a very nice and charming guy, played to win.

Look, Sarah Palin gave us "death panels" and put BO on the defensive for a month over it. Glen Beck and Andrew Breitbart ran Jones and Yosi Sergeant out of government and have gone a long way to destroying ACORN. What the hell has Scharborough done? I am tired of losers calling for civility and centrism. Bullshit. We need bomb throwers who don't care what the media thinks of them and want to win.

P|9.29.09 @ 10:16AM|#

The war is already over. FYI, we lost.

The best thing to do now is make sure the Democrats get 99+% vote totals like in any other respectable dictatorship, which will have the side effect of giving them no excuses at all when their shit crashes and burns.

Rhywun|9.29.09 @ 10:19AM|#

We need bomb throwers who don't care what the media thinks of them and want to win.

As long as we retain a Red Team/Blue Team form of government, forget about that.

Butler T. Reynolds|9.29.09 @ 1:08PM|#

Joe has nice hair.

Enyap|9.29.09 @ 1:20PM|#

Scarboroughs a concern troll

Geotpf|9.29.09 @ 4:25PM|#

Paul oksnee | September 29, 2009, 9:51am | #

Scarborough is MSNBC's idea of fair and balanced.

Then what is Pat Buchanan?

|9.29.09 @ 4:31PM|#

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? I should say not. Any panel that doesn't have a balls on libertarian is a put on like Putin's programming. We want input from our side or we'll put off watching the off putting putts from Scarborough not fair.

tankrunner1123|9.29.09 @ 6:21PM|#

Then what is Pat Buchanan?

________________

The resident Nazi apologist of course

|9.29.09 @ 9:29PM|#

Rhywun said:

"As long as we retain a Red Team/Blue Team form of government, forget about that."

Ahem.

You know who else advocated for a "Third Way"?

Mussolini.

The political spectrum has 0% government control on the right, 100% government control on the left. I want to see the sliding scale for America as close to the right (0% government control) as possible, while still respecting the government's responsibility to ensure safety from foreign threats, and their responsibility to enforce private contracts.

Screw left wing politics. Screw the fascist "Third Way". I want liberty.

Tim|9.29.09 @ 10:47PM|#

What conservatives and libertarians need is not bomb throwers but James Bonds, sophisticated and classy people who still know how to go for the kill. Beck and crew may expose some lefty idiots, but Beck is also certifiable and that turns off a great many people to the right of center side.

Additionally, a lot of the arguments about Obamacare cutting medicare spending and being anti senior are going to make it that much harder to actually reform medicare. We need people like Milton Friedman to go up there and calmly explain economics, or more people like Stossel who have a brain residing in their heads.

Since Breitbart was mentioned I want to exclude him from my comments, I don't know much about him. My comments are largely addressed to people like Beck and Coulter et al.

Rhywun|9.29.09 @ 10:55PM|#

The political spectrum has 0% government control on the right, 100% government control on the left.

There are more than two dimensions. I specifically had the recent German election in mind, where the center-right winner is going to form a coalition with the libertarian-ish party. Something like that is impossible in an American election.

|9.30.09 @ 2:58AM|#

"The political spectrum has 0% government control on the right"


Well, except for the PATRIOT Act, Defense of Marriage Act, and Homeland Security, I'd say this is a true statement.

|10.1.09 @ 5:07PM|#

This is pure lose. We need elbow throwers on our side. More people like Paul and Palin Beck and Limbaugh and less people Like McCain and Scarborough.
This is a political fight and that means actually fighting, instead of acting like you are too good for verbal "bomb throwing."

|10.6.09 @ 2:22AM|#

"to live and work successfully with others requires…an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which… others are allowed to pursue different ends."

Sounds great! Where do I sign up? Oh, yeah, it's never going to happen because I am a Right-Winger therefore I am either insane or just plain evil. To the average Leftist my ideology is dangerous and must be suppressed at all cost. So I should just play nice and get along, right?