The recently passed, fiscal joke of a transportation bill crafted by our “conservative” government brought to mind some interesting reading of a few years back. Liberals can say what they like about David Frum, the erstwhile axis-of-evil speechwriter, but before hitching himself to Bring-‘em-on George he wrote a book about modern conservatism that displeased his right-wing friends more than anyone.
Why? Because he outed them for their past hypocrisy, for what they had become, and for what they’re likely to remain - ideological traitors steeped in big government and big spending. Though a bit dated now, Dead Right (1994) is required reading for anyone interested in an internal analysis of what’s wrong with modern conservatism.
Written from a decidedly libertarian slant, which is admittedly hostile to social conservatism, Frum ripped into the latter as a cynical diversion hatched in the 1980s by economic conservatives who had botched their fathers’ faith. “Mere posturing,” he called all the cultural claptrap - a posture affected simply because “the conservatives failed to do their job”: that of reining in government spending under the Reagan administration.
With the Gipper snug in the White House, wrote Frum, federal spending exploded in a Republican effort to shore up and expand its constituencies (especially farmers, pensioners and veterans) and to hell with the fiscal consequences. Politics trumped policy. And you couldn’t blame congressional Democrats for the big spending, he said of that old dodge. The fault lay directly on Republican shoulders, which relied on supply-side economics to do what less spending should have done. But when the materialistic “cult of Reaganism” fell under attack, conservatives responded en masse by fixating on cultural disturbances (Frum’s timeline; not mine). Hence social conservatism was launched as the Great Diversion, although it was traditional conservatism that had undergone an even greater disturbance. In short, said Frum, Republicans had grown as politically ingratiating as big-government Democrats.
Though I disagree with Frum’s almost casual confidence in the liberating benefits of Social Darwinism, Dead Right nevertheless was a pleasure to read in its marvelous body-slamming against Republican waste.
Needless to say, conservatives paid Frum no mind. They positively revel in throwing money around - or, rather, putting all the fun on the national credit card.
Which brings us back to the profligate $286 billion transportation bill passed by a conservative Congress and signed in Illinois this week by a conservative president (who had to take three stabs at just getting the governor’s name straight). The bill has something for everyone - except, naturally, for those without any political clout. Nearly 10 percent of the bill’s cost goes exclusively to pure, unadulterated pork. It would make Tammany Hall’s graft-specialist George Washington Plunkitt proud: Conservatives seen their opportunities and they took ‘em.
You’ve heard of the bill’s inclusion of items like the “bridge to nowhere” - the $230 million concrete connection between the Alaskan town of Ketchikan and Gravina Island (population 50) - but there are other goodies. More than 6,000, actually, including …
… a $4,000,000 bicycle path and public park for Calexico, California; $2,320,000 for landscaping along the Ronald Reagan Freeway; a $2,000,000 parking lot in San Antonio, Texas; $1,200,000 to install lights and whatnot at the Blue Ridge Music Center in Virginia; an even million for “scenic management planning and implementation” at the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, also in Virginia; $750,000 to improve roads at the Pennsylvania State Baseball Stadium; and a $100,000 traffic light for Canoga Park, California. For just $50,000 I’d gladly stand in Canoga Park’s Independence Avenue and Sherman Way intersection and direct traffic myself.
Nice projects, all, but why a struggling Athens, Georgia family without guaranteed health care or a public school in good repair should pay for a yuppie bike path in Calexico, California is beyond me - and should be beyond anyone with an interest in civilized spending priorities.
Yet this is today’s government by conservatism. Welcome to the Republican version of Tammany Hall politics.