The Limits of Compassion.

IN the media's telling, compassionate conservatism was cruelly abandoned by George W. Bush in his lurch to the right in South Carolina, trampled underfoot on the endless red carpet of the Bob Jones University stage. But it's really the other way around: W. didn't fail compassionate conservatism; it failed him. Not since all the early Gore slogans- "practical idealism," "new horizons"-has a campaign theme flopped so utterly. The primaries have made it clear that Bush may yet win the White House, but only by running on the ideas and themes he developed after compassionate conservatism fell flat.

New Hampshire was compassionate conservatism's Water loo. The substance of compassionate conservatism-to the extent it has any-involves changing regulations and tax law to encourage charities and churches to care for the poor and the troubled. A fine, but picayune, idea. The real advantage of compassionate conservatism was always stylistic, and defensive: It would give Bush the same touchy-feely image as President Clinton. Early in the campaign, the media hailed this as a brilliant tactic, since they are so enamored of sensitivity in general, and of Clinton's caring in particular.

One problem: Republicans hated it. Both Bush and McCain reacted to Clinton's success, but in different ways. While Bush chose to feel our pain, McCain emphasized a tough plain-spokenness that seemed to challenge the feminization of contemporary American politics. In New Hampshire, this manly sensibility dovetailed perfectly with McCain's anti-Clinton rhetoric. W. peppered his speeches with references to "touching every willing heart" and "leaving no child behind," phrases that seemed deliberately evocative of Clinton. McCain talked of "raising a lot of hell" and famously pledged to "beat Gore like a drum."

Voters associated McCain's tough words with honesty, as well they should, since so much of today's sentimental cant in politics depends on evasions and half-truths. Bush routinely says that "single mothers" have the hardest job in America. Actually, many of them don't have jobs at all, but only Jesse Ventura and-on an exceptionally good day-his maverick cousin McCain might be insensitive enough to say it. Bush's compassion schtick also disarmed him in purely tactical terms in New Hampshire, as it dictated that he stay "positive."

So, in New Hampshire, compassionate conservatism had a road test. It made Bush seem Clintonesque, soft, and dishonest, while preventing him from hitting back against his opponent. Matched against McCain's patriotic reformism, Bush's compassion lost by 19 points.

There are other, deeper problems with compassionate conservatism, besides the fact that it doesn't sell. Collective entities, such as government, can't be compassionate; they don't have feelings. Sentiment is a rotten guide to public policy, and conservative ideas perforce have sources besides compassion. This is why so many of W.'s examples of conservative compassion seem so inapt. Letting families keep more of their tax money may be wise, it may be good economics, it may be just, but it is not "compassionate."

When it comes to a contest of compassion, liberals will always have an advantage. The liberal conceit is that government can set a desirable goal and directly mandate its realization. Help the poor? Write a check. Conservatives have a more complicated vision of the importance of institutions, rules, and virtues, which can't be legislated by well- intentioned policymakers. When it comes to the poor, for instance, all government can do is protect the necessary conditions for wealth creation-by maintaining order, freeing the economy for entrepreneurship, and insisting that people fend for themselves. Compassion simply isn't relevant.

As John O'Sullivan and Ramesh Ponnuru have noted in these pages, conservatism is naturally associated with sterner virtues such as patriotism, self-reliance, and duty. Indeed, sentimentality has roots deeply entangled in our culture of self-indulgence and cruelty. It's no accident that President Clinton is famous for two kinds of lip biting. The exaltation of feeling necessarily breaks down self-restraint and hence increases running room for sheer willfulness, for an ethic of personal convenience. So it is that our culture celebrates compassion at the same time it destroys 1.2 million children in the womb every year. If this is the result of a compassionate society, please, let's have more hard-heartedness.

In fairness to Bush, he wasn't alone in paying rhetorical obeisance to compassion. The mascot of John McCain's campaign after New Hampshire was an almost perfect token of feminized America: the crying Boy Scout, once ever prepared, now reduced to a long night of tears by a negative phone call. McCain's relentless attacks on "negative" campaigning were of a piece with the compassionate culture's fear of saying anything critical about anyone, its distaste for argument, its unwillingness to judge. So, it made sense that McCain would stake his campaign on denouncing the leaders of the religious Right as "agents of intolerance": Intolerance is one of the few things that can still safely be called evil.

After New Hampshire, Bush found a better slogan in "reformer with results." More important, in reaction to McCain, he became associated with two pillars of conservatism: limited government and faith. Bush was pushed into rediscovering the first of these by the logic of his defense of tax cuts against McCain's attacks. This is important because no innovation in conservatism-from compassionate conservatism to McCain's call for a renewal of American self-government-makes sense without an agenda of governmental retrenchment and lower taxes.

Tax cuts are often denounced as selfish and materialistic. What this view ignores is that limited government is a necessary condition for freedom, which has its roots in the protection of private property from the state. So to consider as selfish and unworthy efforts to strengthen Americans' claim to their earnings against a government that routinely takes 40 percent of their income is to misunderstand the basis of liberty. Deriding tax cuts as "materialistic" is a little like dismissing the right to vote as "procedural."

It is liberty, of course, that gives meaning to all other virtues of a republican people, including patriotism. A favorite line of pro-McCain neoconservatives is the rhetorical question, How can you hate the government and love your country? Well, the same way Andrew Jackson could hate the second Bank of the United States and still love his country. The same way conservatives in the 1960s and '70s could hate so much of what government did-from confiscatory taxation to corrupt welfare policies to soft criminal justice-but remain unabashed American patriots. In fact, the Jacksonian Scottish-Irish tradition that John McCain partly represents has always mixed distrust of government with a bloody-minded, unreconstructed nationalism (see Walter Russell Mead's brilliant piece on the Jacksonian tradition in the Winter issue of The National Interest).

The two attitudes are a natural fit-because a fighting patriotism belongs in the class of demanding virtues that tend to be smothered by the tender ministrations of the nanny state. Tocqueville warned of the infantilizing tendencies of big government:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

This is why McCain's focus on preserving the security of the modern welfare state runs counter to the virtues of duty, courage, and risk- taking that he argues for when, for instance, he berates the Clinton administration for its cautious conduct of the war over Kosovo. If government keeps us from smoking, and gives us our prescription drugs, and protects us from the distress of negative campaign ads, and devotes almost all of the resources thrown off by the new economy to preserving middle-class entitlements, why should it not also send its warriors into combat at 15,000 feet so they can be as safe and pampered as everyone else?

The other important conservative theme rediscovered, at least indirectly, by Bush during the campaign is faith. Compassionate conservatism was always coupled with Bush's evangelical Christianity, which he tends to describe in a sentimental rhetoric of "the heart." At one meeting of evangelicals in South Carolina, Rep. Duke Cunningham of California warmed up the crowd for Bush by weeping while talking about his faith. This is a style that will grate on Catholics, old-line Protestants, and Jews, a Promise Keepers Christianity of hugs and teary testimonials. But, given a less southern, less evangelical pitch, Bush's message of faith is extremely important, especially in light of the direct challenge to it by John McCain.

McCain's Virginia Beach speech represented a capitulation to what Jean Bethke Elshtain has called "liberal monism," the idea that it isn't enough that state and church be separate, but that civic life should be vacuumed entirely of the irrational, illiberal traces of religious faith and dominated by a neutral language of secularism. Between the lines of McCain's speech was the implicit proposal for a swap of actual, organic religion-intolerant and exclusionary-for a new civic religion of his own devising (details to be announced).

This is a deeply unconservative notion. For better or worse, the Republican party is one of the nation's most important barriers to the total secularization of American public life. So it falls on Bush to defend America's true pluralism from the secularizers by championing and defending from the encroachments of the state the work of churches and synagogues.

Now, faced with a crush of advice to move to the center, the Bush campaign is reviving compassionate conservatism, when it should be leaving its contradictions and limp rhetoric behind. Bush would do better to develop his theme of a "reformer with results." That exact phrase is too defensively formulated with McCain in mind, but the campaign can work with it. Limited government and faith, freedom and religion, the two pillars Bush rediscovered in the primaries, should be integral to any message of conservative reform: Limiting the power of Washington is necessary to reforming it, and faith is the best guarantee of the virtues of a self-regulating people, of what Bush has called "the new responsibility era."

Of course, Bush has to find fresh ways to sell these conservative verities, to make himself "a different kind of Republican." The idea of limited government should be draped not just in the old rhetoric of tax cuts, but brightened by Wall Street and the Internet, by the imaginative, free-wheeling capitalist spirit captured in those fantastic Ameritrade TV ads. This might mean rejiggering his tax plan to include an idea like McCain's investor-friendly family savings accounts, and generally becoming more conversant with the web. Bush should align himself with the sensibility of the new investor class, encourage its growth, and use it as a wedge to reduce the reach of the welfare state.

As for faith, it shouldn't, of course, be touted in Jerry Falwell terms- not that that was ever in the offing. Like Jimmy Carter's, Bush's faith should be the background music to his opposition to the corruption and partisan poison of contemporary Washington; when Washington seems in need of redemption, there is something to be said for having a president who is "born again." Bush's hope should be that, just as in 1994, the Democratic attacks on Christian conservatives-just like John McCain's- will be recklessly overwrought, and interpreted by the faithful as a direct assault on them.

All of this should be wrapped in a patriotic appeal, for which-as McCain demonstrated, to his great credit-there is a tremendous hunger. It is freedom for which so many American men have died, and it is faith that every day prompts us, as McCain put it, to devote ourselves to causes greater than our self-interest. Bush should unashamedly borrow this language of patriotic purpose from McCain-and be quietly grateful to him for drubbing compassionate conservatism in New Hampshire.