On September 29, the United States Congress rejected a $700 billion financial bailout bill with a vote of 228 to 205. Two-thirds of the Republican Party—a party supposedly in the pocket of Wall Street—made up the majority of the “No” vote, with 95 Democrats by their sides. In light of the string of American bank failures and global shockwaves in Europe and Asia, one wonders why the GOP did so little to ameliorate the financial destruction.
There are surface-level answers to this question, from worries about “moral hazard” to claims that Democratic Speaker Pelosi had injected too much partisanship into the debate. But the real reason behind the ambivalence is that conservative ideology is comprised of several competing political visions that create a constant tension, one that has manifested itself in Republican policies over the past eight years.
The basic tension in American conservatism is described by fusionism, a political term coined by former National Review editor Frank Meyer. Fusionism describes the difficulty of reconciling libertarians with social reactionaries within the conservative movement—balancing the desire to maximize freedom with the need to provide order and stable institutions for society. For years, especially during the Cold War, fusionism held together conservatism by serving as the tacit agreement between the two dominant visions of the movement. Libertarians learned from social conservatives that strong institutions (such as the family) helped promote freedom. Social conservatives learned that freedom fostered the virtues of individual responsibility. Of course, these two visions didn’t always jibe with each other.
At the same time, other strands of conservatism served to destabilize this already volatile situation. Arguably the most divisive component of conservatism was neoconservatism. This “persuasion,” as so-called founder Irving Kristol calls it, is comprised of former 70s-era Trotskyites and liberals who were uneasy with the left’s nonchalance towards Soviet totalitarianism, cultural decay, and American economic decline. While neoconservatives disliked the moral relativism of the period, they did not share a consensus on social issues. Neoconservatives were more comfortable with a modern welfare state of subsidies and services than libertarians. At the end of the day, neoconservatives were boosters of an American-led world system. They supported the system of international liberalism, democracy, and capitalism that America had inherited and shaped since 1945. To that end, they advocated for tax cuts to spur economic growth and free trade to bolster the global economic system, understanding that these policies would keep America powerful and in charge of its world order.
In recent years, the phenomenon of globalization has strained relations between these three political visions. This was evident when the Bush-McCain-Kennedy immigration reforms were defeated in 2007. While neoconservatives and libertarians felt that the party of economic freedom needed to support the growth-inducing benefits that immigration brings, it was the social conservatives and their reactionary allies who won the fight. Animated by a populist fear of social chaos and unnecessary stress on American institutions (and perhaps a tinge of xenophobia), they were able to kill the proposed guest-worker program and put the construction of a physical barrier between the U.S. and Mexico on the agenda. This intra-party, intra-ideology tension was also apparent in the recent defeats of free trade bills with U.S. allies South Korea and Central America. Social conservatives have had their share of disappointments. Despite Bush’s professed piety, the past eight years have not been satisfying to proponents of “family values.” Even though they have held a congressional majority for six years, both Republican bills to define marriage as being a strictly heterosexual, monogamous union were defeated. Nearly nothing has been done on a federal level about abortion, save a ban on partial-birth abortion.
We can contextualize the defeat of the bailout plan by Republicans with this in mind. It is highly probable that libertarian-leaning legislators argued against the bill on grounds that laissez-faire ideology precludes saving people from their own failures. Social conservatives probably voted down the bill out of an already latent discomfort with globalization, of which a highly liquid and destabilizing global financial system is a key component. The one-third minority that did support the bailout was arguably comprised of neoconservatives who believed the health of international capitalism rested on the foundations of global confidence in financial institutions. Without investor confidence, the system that provided the developed world with so much economic prosperity, and the developing world with rising living standards, was in jeopardy—it would no longer possess the financial capital to create economic opportunities.
