Conscience of a Conservative by Jeff Flake

Author:Jeff Flake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

IN THE SPRING OF 2017, during the apex of our greatest political dysfunction, the secretary of defense, former marine general James Mattis, was asked by Dexter Filkins, a writer for The New Yorker, what worried him most. Unexpectedly for a man in his position, he said this: “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.”

A few years before, one of Secretary Mattis’s predecessors at the Pentagon, Secretary Bob Gates, had also been asked to identify the greatest threat to American national security. Like Mattis, Gates answered not by discussing Islamic jihad or a rising China or any number of other areas of geopolitical concern and instead said this:

I think the biggest threat to our future sits in Washington, D.C., and not someplace else. The rest of the problems of the world wouldn’t worry me if we had a functional government. And if we had a Congress that could begin to address some of the long-term problems that the country has. I mean, the reality is our problems are deep enough in every category that none of them can be resolved during the course of one presidency or one Congress. So you need bipartisan solutions that can be sustained through more than one presidency and more than one Congress. And we don’t see any evidence of that in Washington.

There you have it. Politicians who don’t do their jobs are an actual threat to national security. These two wise men—who were as well versed via daily classified briefings into the inventory of actual enemies of liberty as any Americans—each independently identified his greatest worry and our gravest threat to be, essentially, ourselves. That should have been enough to make us all vow to cease this nonsense. But that would require both wisdom and courage, and these days, the political class in Washington seemed to possess neither.

It is one of the great paradoxes of our time that the nastiness and dysfunction that weakened the American will and softened the ground for the extraordinary election of 2016, rather than being remedied by the election, only begat more nastiness and dysfunction in the election’s wake. It’s as if we as a political culture had an irresistible morbid curiosity to see for ourselves just how bad we could be. An urge to the extreme, just to see what it’s like. But the truth is, this slide into political entropy was a long time coming.

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Before the collapse of conservative principle came the collapse of any semblance of a functional national politics. And if our failures of principle were manifest, our political failures, too, ranged from the prosaic to the extraordinary and everything in between. Seeking advantage over our opponents, we poisoned the civic fountain from which we all drink, with predictable results.

In that, I am not blameless.

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