Reclaiming Conservatism
By Mickey Edwards
(Oxford University Press, 230 pages, $22)

Though George W. Bush has yet to leave the White House, conservative partisans are already in a lather over how their movement has fallen from grace. Most of the recent spate of articles and books, such as David Frum's Comeback, focus on how the Republicans can regain the initiative at the polls.

Mickey Edwards, a former Oklahoma congressman, takes a different and hugely welcome tack. In Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—And How It Can Find Its Way Back, Edwards diagnoses the movement's spiritual, as distinct from its political, malaise. In fact, he argues that the urge to win at all costs turned modern conservatism inside out and betrayed its principles.

Edwards is not the first to make this charge; Alan Greenspan also remarked in his recent memoir that Republicans had traded "principle for power." But Edwards, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation who is now at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, delves deeper into what those principles are. Although it has often been observed that the Bush administration departed from conservatism by running up big deficits, Edwards argues that its betrayal was far more comprehensive.

At its root, he contends, conservatism is not about mere budget numbers; it is a philosophy espousing prudent and limited government. Its lineage can be traced to the liberal tradition of John Locke, to whom individual liberty was the paramount value and a too-powerful state was a constant threat.

Thus, the U.S. Constitution (a profoundly liberal document for its time) established a government whose powers are both limited and divided. The Bush administration, Edwards contends, violated this idea in virtually every area. It abrogated Congress's responsibility for conducting war and other foreign policies. It ran roughshod over individual liberties, notably by approving unauthorized wiretaps and suspending habeas corpus for accused terrorists. It undermined the legislative function with its excessive secrecy, which prevented Congress from giving "informed consent." Bush also attached hundreds of signing statements that limit the scope of duly enacted laws.

Equally abhorrent to the Lockean credo is the effort by Bush-era conservatives to impose lifestyle and religious conformity on the rest of the country. Moral intolerance on the right has a lengthy pedigree; indeed, it dates back to the Inquisition. But to Edwards, the Christian right has tainted the small-government, live-and-let-live ideal. He offers Barry Goldwater as modern conservatism's standard-bearer, albeit one who was highly flawed. Unforgivably, Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But unlike today's Republicans, he firmly opposed intrusions by the state into people's lives.

And through the early '70s, Edwards reminds us, the Republican platform was silent on so-called family values, treating morality as a matter of individual choice. Republicans then were hardly sympathetic to the counterculture, but they didn't attempt to legislate it out of existence, as contemporary conservatives have with antigay amendments and the like. Today, conservative jurists such as Robert Bork inveigh against "unelected" judges for protecting abortion rights. Edwards says tirades of this kind are profoundly mistaken because the Constitution's framers intended judges to be a bulwark against the potential tyranny of majorities.

For Edwards, the early Reagan years were the high-water mark of conservative achievement. The test of principle came when he and other Republican legislators refused to toe the line when they disagreed with Reagan, as was the case with taxes and aid to the Nicaraguan contras. (When a staffer suggested that Edwards condemn congressional Democrats for "interfering" in foreign policy, Edwards promised to do so if the aide "would first enlarge a copy of the Constitution … and highlight the sections that state that the president is in charge of foreign policy." There are none.)

But during the Reagan era, Republican hard-liners began to denigrate the powers of Congress and advance a more elevated role for the White House. In the '90s, Newt Gingrich imposed a system of strict discipline on House Republicans, and scoring political points trumped matters of conscience. Gingrich was eventually toppled, but the scorched-earth partisanship persisted. Today, the party votes for whatever the president wants, and Republicans on Capitol Hill have utterly forgotten that Congress is a co-equal branch.

Edwards is just as scathing in his condemnation of Bush, whom he derisively labels a mini-monarch. When, finally, in 2007, a group of congressional Republicans voiced their concerns about Iraq to the president and had the temerity to discuss this with the press, it was reported that a White House staffer—a staffer!—"rebuked" one of the congressmen, as if he were not a member of an independent branch.

Edwards views the neocons who promoted the war in Iraq as similar to the Christian right—a faction that "infiltrated" the conservative movement without absorbing its ideals. The neocons, he argues, trampled on the premise of modest government by launching an ill-conceived war. Edwards ruefully observes that such overreaching would be a lesser sin among liberals, who espouse an activist government. But, he laments, "those who call themselves conservatives have managed to forget whose side they're on."

To his further credit, Edwards rejects the rhetoric of conservative extremists who say that "government is the enemy." Edwards rejoins that the U.S. government, with its splendid constitutional protections, should be celebrated instead of demeaned. His eloquence in the service of a forgotten cause is such that liberals and conservatives alike will read this volume with nostalgia and regret.