No Booty Shaking Allowed

In a fine article at Evangelical Outpost Joe Carter cites the Texas cheerleader "booty shaking" legislation to make the point that conservatism isn't really so much about small government as it is about healing sick societies. The heart of his post is this passage:

I believe this example provides an opportunity to clarify a misunderstanding about conservatives and our attitude toward legislating issues of morality and "taste." While resolving disputes over the locus of autonomy, responsibility, and sphere sovereignty of institutions is essential, conservatism isn't, as is commonly misperceived, about "small government."

When it comes to government, conservatives are admittedly somewhat clueless. Unlike libertarians, liberals, socialists, Marxists, and other advocates of utopian political philosophies, conservatism has no idea how to build a healthy social and political structure. We do know, however, how to recognize a sick one. Just as physicians define bodily health as the absence of sickness, conservatives view the absence of sickness as the primary gauge of the health of the body politic. Our political objective, therefore, is similar to that of medical doctors -- eliminating sickness.

The late media critic and educator Neil Postman used this same medical analogy in describing the proper role of teachers. In his essay "The Educationist as Painkiller", Postman proposes that educators don't try to make students intelligent, because we don't know how to do that, but instead try to cure stupidity in "some of the more obvious forms, such as either-or thinking; overgeneralization; inability to distinguish between facts and inferences; and reification, a disturbingly prevalent tendency to confuse words with things."

"Stupidity is a form of behavior," adds Postman, "It is not something we have; it is something we do." The presence of stupidity can therefore be reduced by changing behavior. As a guiding political philosophy, conservatism plays a similar role in society as Postman's paradigmatic teacher. Conservatives, in essence, prescribe procedures for avoiding moral stupidity.

His analysis of what it is conservatives seek to accomplish is interesting. It's true that, as a general rule, bloated governments are symptomatic of a sick society. Consider for example the great harm done to the poor in this country by addicting them to the vast welfare state that subsidized and perpetuated all manner of social dysfunction from the sixties to the nineties. It doesn't follow, however, that there should never be instances, e.g. disaster relief, conservation of historical sites or biologically significant lands, or homeland security, when government takes on a larger role in society. Nevertheless, it requires great care and discernment to assess where and in which way government should be granted power to grow and act, and the way is fraught with many perils.

Carter suggests that it may perhaps be counterproductive for conservatives to argue adamantly that government should be kept as small and unintrusive as it can be, consistent with its role in national defense. After all, conservatives want the government to be intrusive when it's a matter of regulating pornography or sleazy television programming. By what principle do we call on government to protect us from the assaults of the concupiscent juveniles who write television scripts but insist that government stay out of other areas of our lives?

So the question, especially in light of President Bush's exercise of "compassionate conservatism" and his indulgence of deficit spending, is whether conservatives should rethink their traditional view of government. Mr. Bush has certainly given us occasion to begin that reassessment.

The fear that people like me have in saying all this, though, is that once we allow our ideological tether to slacken we risk losing the security and consistency afforded by a well-anchored set of guiding principles. Even worse, we risk, heaven forbid, becoming moderates.