Living in the real world: everyone has to do it, including conservatives.

EVER since the end of the Cold War, torrents of analysis have predicted that the conservative movement was about to come unglued. Our defining rationale--antiCommunism--had vanished, and without that stanchion securely planted in terra firma the various members of the coalition would fly off in different directions, libertarians decamping for their never land, evangelicals for theirs. But the truth is that such predictions predate the end of the Cold War by a long shot. Robert Nisbet and others argued (often in these pages) that the Reagan coalition was intellectually untenable and could never last.

This perennial observation has, of late, dovetailed nicely with more conventional political punditry. Bush is a lame duck and, more important, he is very unpopular--and so Congress is running away from him on everything from port security to the budget. Free-market conservatives are feeling their oats these days, symbolized by Bruce Bartlett's broadside against Bush as an "impostor" in his book of that name. Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard has an indictment of the GOP as crapulent and corrupt coming out this spring. George Will, who has been quite tart toward Bush for a while, grew downright testy over the Harriet Miers nomination ("for this we need a conservative president?").

Bush's plight is what social scientists might call an "over-determined" event. In other words, all sorts of things were militating toward a certain amount of exhaustion with Bush. While everyone focused on the anti-Bush motivations behind the Democrats' selecting their worst presidential nominee since Michael Dukakis, few appreciated how much of Bush's support in 2004 was attributable to anti-Kerry views. The ongoing slog in Iraq, Bush's inability to get credit for a good economy, and his missteps on Miers, Katrina, and Dubai made some buyer's remorse almost inevitable.

But in the background there was an even larger problem: compassionate conservatism.

As countless writers have noted in National Review over the last five years, most conservatives never really understood what compassionate conservatism was, beyond a convenient marketing slogan to attract swing voters. The reality--as even some members of the Bush team will sheepishly concede--is that there was nothing behind the curtain. Sure, in the hands of Marvin Olasky and others, compassionate conservatism had some heft. But Karl Rove's translation of it into a political platform made it into a pseudo-intellectual rationale for constituent-pleasing and Nixonian "modern Republicanism." This is not to say that there haven't been good policy initiatives to come out of the Bush White House, but they've been good mostly because they were conservative simpliciter. Social Security privatization hardly amounts to a new kind of conservatism, never mind a conservatism that has made peace with a large welfare state.

Fred Barnes, who has done the heaviest lifting in defense of Bush's political "philosophy," originally called compassionate conservatism "big-government conservatism." But this description was unsatisfying for a host of reasons, including its obvious oxymoronic flavor. So he switched to "strong-government conservatism." Strength! What conservative doesn't like strength? But, as John O'Sullivan has repeatedly argued, this defense--like the brand of politics it defends--is rooted more in marketing than in first principles.

The concept of marketing really gets to the core of the conservative dilemma. Say it with me: Conservatism is not popular. Say it out loud if you must, tot it is something many conservatives are in deep denial about. If the editors of National Review sat down and figured out what the ideal conservative society would look like, that portrait would be a very, very bad platform for a politician interested in getting elected. The average American likes a lot more government than the average conservative. This will in all likelihood never, ever change.

The red-state majority that solidified the Republican realignment is not a conservative majority. It is a Republican majority. Conservatives are merely one very important part of the coalition. This shouldn't surprise anyone who reads the newspaper regularly. The Bush White House treats conservatives like a constituency to be pleased when possible, placated or snubbed when necessary. Indeed, the conservative movement is itself a coalition, featuring many different kinds of right-winger--libertarians, hawks, evangelicals, et al.

Because this elemental fact is so widely and often misunderstood, we are constantly hearing about a "conservative crackup." Those who have made such claims over the last 20 years could all have used a course in American Politics 101. Coalitions have long lives, even if their members are sometimes in tension with each another. The FDR coalition contained everyone from Communist Jews to progressive blacks to southern segregationists. That coalition lasted--amidst some violent ideological infighting--for nearly two generations. More important, "liberalism" variously defined was the dominant, and often the sole, political outlook of the American establishment. The epic battles over everything from civil rights to foreign policy didn't fundamentally change that fact. Dwight Eisenhower was the first choice of many ADA liberals as well as fairly conservative Republicans in 1952. But Eisenhower didn't appreciably damage the liberal consensus of the so-called "vital center" or the New Deal. Similarly, Bill Clinton--despite some efforts at mischief in his first term--found himself constrained by the borders of the Reagan realignment. In the end, he had to be a free trader and champion of school uniforms and the like. He may not have liked signing welfare reform, but he understood that the reality of post-Reagan politics required it.

The challenge for conservatives is to understand that, in the words of former NR publisher William Rusher, "politicians will always disappoint you." It is the refusal to accept this sad troth that has caused many conservatives to conclude that, it" the politicians can't come to the mountain, the mountain must move to the politicians. This is the motivation that gave impetus to compassionate conservatism in all its forms. In the 1980s and early 1990s, ,lack Kemp described himself as a "bleeding-heart conservative"--an attempt to redefine conservatism as a different kind of progressivism and to prove that he really did care about the things Good People care about. As Ramesh Ponnum has noted, Pat Buchanan's "conservatism of the heart" wasn't a more authentic form of "true" (or "paleo") conservatism, but a leftward lurch toward statism that tried to defend activist government in the name of socially conservative sentiments. Compassionate conservatism was just the latest iteration of the same impulse, so much so that Buchanan joked he would sue Bush for plagiarism.

In the last half-decade, a slew of writers have devised new conservative-sounding programs and fads to make popular or progressive ideas and sentiments sound authentically conservative. From South Park Republicans, to whatever "movement" Andrew Sullivan claims to be leading this month, to Rod Dreher's "crunchy cons," the impulse seems to be to take any "good" thing and call it "conservative." Part of this is the naturally seductive appeal of populism. If"the people" are for it, well, it must be good. And if it's good, there must be some way to make it "conservative." So, for example, Dreher embraces a smorgasbord of popular liberal-Left assumptions about the environment, organic foods, and whatnot and says that, since he is a good conservative, these things must be conservative too. This narcissism caused him to support a pro-choice liberal Democrat over Joe Barton, the incumbent pro-life conservative in his congressional district, because Barton is "soft" on pollution. "I wonder," writes Dreher, "why it doesn't occur to these voters--and their pastors-that the fact that their children suffer from asthma and respiratory diseases is a family-values issue."

Many on the right notice this sort of "growth" on the part of other Republicans and conservatives and retreat into the bunker of Purity. Charges of so-and-so's being a RINO (Republican in name only), creeping Gergenism, and general apostasy have been a staple of conservative squabbles since well before William F. Buckley nudged the Birchers off the conservative dais. Such charges need to be weighed on a case-by-case basis. Surely Kevin Phillips is no longer a conservative in good standing, no matter his ability to convince NPR producers otherwise.

The problem with a bunker mentality should be obvious. Living in a powerless ghetto with no loaf is surely not preferable to living in the real world with half of one. This tension is one that National Review has wrestled with every day since its founding. Hence we have to give at least one cheer for marketing. If politicians can't make conservatism at least sound attractive, then conservatism becomes an otherworldly hobby, like Dungeons & Dragons. The trick, therefore, is to fight your battles where you can. But we must be ever-mindful of the danger of confusing marketing slogans for principles. The American public and the media will always be more favorably inclined toward a government that, to quote George W. Bush, "moves" when somebody hurts. That hardly means we should say that such a government is operating on conservative ideas, even if doing so would make conservatism sound more appealing, and conservatives more "with it." "It will never be known," remarked the French poet Charles Peguy in 1905, "what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive."