THE WANDERER, FEBRUARY 5, 2004

JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH

The Open Conspiracy

     A Massachusetts liberal for president? With John 
Kerry the clear Democratic front-runner now, it's a live 
possibility. He whipped Howard Dean easily in the New 
Hampshire primary, where Dean was supposed to make, and 
may in fact have made, his strongest showing. Democrats 
who feared that George Bush would crush Dean are now 
rallying to Kerry just because he's the front-runner.

     New Hampshire probably effectively ended the 
presidential hopes of Gen. Wesley Clark and Joe 
Lieberman. John Edwards, who finished a surprising second 
in the Iowa caucuses a week earlier, also finished 
poorly.

     How well will Kerry wear across the country over a 
long campaign? Not very, I think. He's widely regarded as 
an off-putting Brahmin, arrogant and pompous. And he may 
be peaking too soon. An assembly-line liberal, he's 
unlikely to generate lasting enthusiasm. But he topped 
Bush in a recent NEWSWEEK poll, 49% to 46%, so the 
president can no longer assume the November election is 
his to lose.

     Bush may have peaked too early too. His popularity 
reached its height last year, in the flush of victory 
over Iraq. Sound familiar? It's family history. His 
father enjoyed terrific poll ratings after defeating Iraq 
in 1991. Then came 1992 ...

     Bush may be repeating his father's pattern in 
another respect: He's angering his base. Conservative 
fury at his big-spending ways was evident at the recent 
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 
Alexandria, Va., just across the Potomac from Washington. 
And 23 Republican congressmen have just written a letter 
warning Bush that their GOP constituents are so angry at 
his guest-worker proposal that they may sit out this 
year's election.

     I popped into the CPAC gathering briefly and asked 
two youngsters at a pro-Bush booth in what way Bush is 
conservative. They gave me a baffled look. Others were 
quoted as complaining that Bush treats conservatives with 
contempt.

     Wartime popularity is notoriously short-lived. The 
very ease of both Bushes' victories over Iraq proved that 
there was no Iraqi threat to this country in the first 
place, and the incumbent Bush is backing away from his 
obsessive insistence that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of 
mass destruction," a charge now discredited even by David 
Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

     Not long ago the administration was accused of 
manipulating the intelligence services in order to 
provide a false justification for war. Now the White 
House is saying that those services misled Bush! Either 
way, Bush doesn't look good. Yet he continues to insist 
that the war was somehow justified. It's an awkward 
defensive posture, and one thing a president doesn't need 
during an election year is growing skepticism about 
whether his word can be trusted.

     In contrast to both Dean and Bush, Kerry is a steady 
performer who doesn't commit many gaffes. Republicans are 
already scrambling through his record looking for 
damaging statements, but they aren't coming up with much. 
He's smart enough to take full advantage of Bush's 
vulnerabilities and neutralize his strengths. Bush, on 
the other hand, is in no position to paint Kerry as 
either a peacenik or a big-spending liberal.

     If Kerry doesn't inspire much passion, Bush does. 
But it's the wrong kind. The voters most likely to turn 
out in November are those who want to throw him out of 
the White House.

     And why should conservatives fear that? With Bush 
gone and replaced by a Democratic president, the 
Republican Party might start opposing the expansion of 
government again. Of course a Kerry victory might also 
bring a shift of power in Congress, restoring a 
Democratic majority, at least in the House of 
Representatives. But neither party would have a clear 
monopoly of power.

     Bush has been our first neoconservative president -- 
eager for war in the Mideast, indifferent to social 
issues, reconciled to the growth of federal power, 
unconcerned about federal spending. He is barely to the 
right of Kerry, except perhaps on same-sex marriage.

     What would they really have to debate about? To 
borrow Bill Buckley's great line, it would be like the 
Smith Brothers debating on cough drops.

     Fred Barnes of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the neocon 
bulletin board, actually celebrates Bush as a 
"big-government conservative." There you have it -- 
though it might be more accurate to say "a big-government 
man who wants to be called a conservative." One would 
think "big-government" conservatism is a contradiction in 
terms; unless Barnes means that Bush is conserving big 
government, in which case he certainly has a point. After 
Bush, it may be vain to hope for limited, constitutional 
government.


Petty Tyranny

     As long ago as the 1930s, H.G. Wells prophesied "the 
Open Conspiracy" -- by which he meant an international 
tendency toward a one-world bureaucratic regime, which he 
already (approvingly) saw taking shape. Communists, 
socialists, liberals, and other "progressives" around the 
globe were all working toward the new order Wells 
foresaw; maybe he wouldn't be surprised to find 
self-styled conservatives, in time, joining the 
irresistible movement too.

     I never tire of quoting Chesterton: "Men can always 
be blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough." And 
the thing men in our time seem most blind to is simply 
the astounding growth of the state -- not only in its 
enormous scale, not only in its "totalitarian" extremes 
of horror and cruelty, but simply in its penetration of 
all the details of life. It isn't Hiroshima or the Gulag 
that brings this home to me, but the irritating legal 
restrictions I encounter when attempting something as 
simple as having my dog groomed.

     It's the sort of petty tyranny Tocqueville 
predicted, but on a scale he couldn't have imagined. Yet 
we take it all for granted. 

     I marvel that this change from traditional 
government to the all-encompassing state has hardly been 
noticed. A transformation as profound as the Industrial 
Revolution (which helped make it possible) still has no 
handy, recognizable name. Good or bad, it's certainly a 
historical *fact* of the first magnitude. 

     And if it's bad, we can't expect politicians to do 
anything to correct it. After all, going with the flow is 
their way of life. So naturally there isn't much to 
choose between a Bush and a Kerry. One party wants the 
state to move this way; the other wants it to go in 
another direction. But both want to keep it basically as 
it is.

     The problem won't be solved until it's properly 
defined; and it won't be defined until people recognize 
it as a problem. Unfortunately, few of us do recognize it 
as such. Fewer and fewer are old enough to remember 
living under any other regime; and the young are taught 
that the era of relative freedom was a Dark Age. The Open 
Conspiracy has succeeded.

                 +          +          +

     Every month I try to define the problem more 
sharply, while finding a few amusing angles, in my 
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                                        --- Joseph Sobran

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