By Alan Bean

Andrew Bacevich could easily be dismissed as a liberal.  He is a political scientist who teaches at Boston University, and  he has been a persistent and outspoken critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He thinks abortion and gay marriage are part of the American landscape and should be accepted as such.  He isn’t in favor of gutting the American welfare system.

But Bacevich is a conservative and a Republican, just not the kind whose star is currently in the ascendancy.  That is, he is a conservative and he is a Republican; but he’s not what is commonly understood as a conservative Republican.

Bacevich is a fiscal conservative.  He believes America needs to get its fiscal house in order–but he thinks the cuts should come from our bloated military and our alphabet soup of national security agencies, not from programs that help the poor.

Bacevich is also a social conservative.  A devout Roman Catholicm he believes the family is the primary building block of American society, and he thinks the family is in serious trouble.  In his view, the problem isn’t that gays are getting married; it’s that straights aren’t staying married.  But we won’t solve the problem by preaching personal responsibility; we’ve got to create jobs that pay a living wage.

Bacevich, in other words, wouldn’t feel comfortable among most Republicans I know or among most Democrats; he represents the kind of third-way thinking that I have long advocated. (more…)