Jim Wallis wrote an interesting blog about one of George Bushes speech writers and a comment to his new book: Heroic Conservatism.
Due to our common interest in overcoming poverty, I knew Mike Gerson before he became George Bush’s speechwriter. I recently had lunch with him to reconnect since he’s left the White House and heard some of the stories he’s now written about in his new book, Heroic Conservatism.
This morning’s Washington Post has a good news piece on Gerson and his book.
For Michael Gerson, the pattern became discouragingly familiar. A proposal to help the poor or sick would be presented at a White House meeting, but Vice President Cheney’s office or the budget team or some other skeptical officials would shoot it down. Too expensive. Wrong priority.
By the time he left the White House as President Bush’s senior adviser last year, Gerson by his own account had grown weary of the battle, becoming an irritable colleague disillusioned by the conventions of a political party and a government that seemed indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden.
The article quotes from Gerson’s book
“Traditional conservatism has a piece missing – a piece that is shaped like a conscience,” he notes in Heroic Conservatism. His ambition, he says, is to help “save conservatism from its worst instincts” and build “a conservatism elevated by a radical concern for human rights and dignity.”
Now an op-ed writer for The Post, he has a column today making the same point. He says there are two competing belief systems in the Republican Party – libertarianism and Catholic social teaching – and writes,
The difference between these visions is considerable. Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules – free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government – asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread – it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering.
Gerson is right – how any society treats “the least of these” is God’s measure. And by that measure, our society is sorely lacking.
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