Sullivan is, I believe, a conservative of the "old school" - a fiscal conservative who, as a consequence of believing in smaller and less intrusive government, tends to question any growth in government involvement/interference. In his article he seems to have taken a term formerly used to excoriate liberal/progessive governments that established extensive social safety nets and introduced legislation aimed at improving worker and consumer safety. Nanny states introduce seat-belt legislation and hand out money to lazy layabouts.
What Sullivan is describing, even though he calls it a nanny state, is more along the lines of a government lurching toward theocratic and corporatised fascism. The Bush government's attempts to impose a particular moral perspective on the American people is, I think, not a result of so-called "compassionate conservatism" but rather a pandering to the influential Christian fundamentalist movement in the U.S. It has always been a truism that "ya dance with them what brung ya", and the fundamentalists were a significant element in the rightist coalition that currently serves as the electoral base of the American Republican Party.
As for some of the other actions that Sullivan ascribes to "nanny statism", many are actually measures adopted to satisfy the Republican Party's other main support base - corporations. Banning of certain herbal remedies, for example, is not really about protecting the consumer, it's about limiting alternatives to the product base of the influential pharmaceutical industry. The same reason lies behind aspects of the Bush administration's recent medicare bill, which actually limits consumer options available to seniors and ensures that they will have less opportunity to seek out competitve prices for pharmaceutical products.
I would argue that the Bush administration is neither compassionate nor truely conservative in the old-school sense of adhering to principles of fiscal responsibility. And it's certainly not liberal - classical liberal theory being associated with the freedoms of individuals to dissent, particularly in political and religious arenas, and to engage in free use of property.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-10-19 11:01 am (UTC)What Sullivan is describing, even though he calls it a nanny state, is more along the lines of a government lurching toward theocratic and corporatised fascism. The Bush government's attempts to impose a particular moral perspective on the American people is, I think, not a result of so-called "compassionate conservatism" but rather a pandering to the influential Christian fundamentalist movement in the U.S. It has always been a truism that "ya dance with them what brung ya", and the fundamentalists were a significant element in the rightist coalition that currently serves as the electoral base of the American Republican Party.
As for some of the other actions that Sullivan ascribes to "nanny statism", many are actually measures adopted to satisfy the Republican Party's other main support base - corporations. Banning of certain herbal remedies, for example, is not really about protecting the consumer, it's about limiting alternatives to the product base of the influential pharmaceutical industry. The same reason lies behind aspects of the Bush administration's recent medicare bill, which actually limits consumer options available to seniors and ensures that they will have less opportunity to seek out competitve prices for pharmaceutical products.
I would argue that the Bush administration is neither compassionate nor truely conservative in the old-school sense of adhering to principles of fiscal responsibility. And it's certainly not liberal - classical liberal theory being associated with the freedoms of individuals to dissent, particularly in political and religious arenas, and to engage in free use of property.