Politics within limits

Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election took place during my first semester in graduate school. Naturally, I was dismayed and frightened.

But when I expressed my fears to Richard Neustadt, who taught the Kennedy School politics course, he told me I could relax. “Nixon has no sense of limits,” he said. “He will be destroyed.” In that, GWB resembles Nixon, by contrast with Roosevelt or Johnson or Reagan, who were hungry for power and skilled at acquiring it but who shared a sense of what the actual, as opposed to the legal, constitution of the United States would, and would not, tolerate.

Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan were, in their own ways, Oakeshottian figures, capable of pursuing politics within limits. GWB, like Gingrich, is a more barnburning, revolutionary figure, though GWB is less clear than Gingrich on what his revolution is supposed to accomplish.

That sort of anti-Oakeshottian contempt for limits is now, among those with actual political power, far more typical of the right than of the left, making the term “conservative” a curious misnomer. That the index of Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues has no entry for “temperance” or “moderation” tells you all you really need to know.