Specter: Red (White and Blue) Tory

Specter has little regard for parties and movements. He is a man who serves the people, a man of, for, and by them. He votes the interests of Pennsylvania. He votes the interests of the United States. He has no need and no desire to flatter the theory-driven assumptions of a particular creed.

These things render him a rarity in the tedious world of American politics, a world full of tiny crooks and cranks who want nothing more than to be part of a crowd. The right crowd, preferably, but really any will do.

Specter is a different creature. He stands on his own two feet. He follows no program. He takes issues one at a time, evaluating them honestly, without ideological prejudgment.

For this fair and measured, pragmatic and solutions-oriented disposition, he is loathed by conservatives and distrusted by liberals. It is proof of our degenerate state that independence of thought is today scorned rather than seen for what it truly is: A virtue supreme.

I place Specter within the Red Tory tradition, a distressingly, depressingly quiet strain of American conservatism. Like any good Red Tory, Specter proves that one can be conservative without being right wing.

The senator is protective of the “little guy.” His conservatism, which is deeply paternal, grows from this impulse. He is a partisan of the middle class, as it exists along Main Street, not in pristine corporate suburbs.

Unlike the right wing radicals who now dominate Republicanism, his conservatism is—surprise, surprise—actually about conserving. Specter champions the midcentury socioeconomic consensus that led America to the top. He is sympathetic to labor, socially tolerant without being mindlessly progressive, friendly to matters of personal freedom (from guns to abortion), convinced that the market exists for people and must be manipulated to serve the common good.

The bailout highlights his Tory tendencies. In propping up the companies, Specter was not supporting government interference so much as he was supporting social order. The left-conservative seeks continuum and guards the status quo. He abhors large, sudden change because it tends to uproot, overturn, and otherwise harmfully effect ordinary people.

Ordinary people are Specter’s people. He is their gray tribune.

Specter is an awkward fit in either party because he has managed to reconcile what are too often considered utterly disparate impulses.

The hacks hate him because he reveals just how petty and corrupt they are. His refusal to play the game has made him many enemies, but it has earned him a friend in the American people.

Yes, he's a Red Tory: Red, white, and blue.