It is, in all seriousness, it is a distressing and depressing time to be a conservative. I’m reminded of the old saying by Mao—things are always darkest before they go completely black.
In recent years, we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself with its association with scandal, with its willful lack of fiscal discipline, and with its utter disinterest in the reforms that America needs. And at the same time, we watched a Republican President abet or passively accept the excesses of his Congressional party and, more importantly, fail to take the steps—until perhaps now—fail to take the steps to win a major foreign war….
So we need to figure out a way how to make conservative policy and principles appealing and relevant again to the American public, and we need to do it together.
Note the passive tone Lowry uses to signify a lack of agency, even victimhood—“we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself” and “we watched a Republican President abet or passively accept the excesses of his Congressional party.” Lowry depicts himself and his poor fellow movement conservatives as victims: They have stood by helplessly and with such sadness as the country was damaged by a president and Congress that abandoned and violated their conservative principles and left conservatives isolated and with nowhere to turn.
But the deceit here is manifest. Lowry and his “conservative” comrades were anything but passive observers over the last six years. They did far more than “watch” as the president and the Congress “disgraced” themselves and damaged this country. It was self-identified “conservatives” who were the principal cheerleaders, the most ardent and loyal propagandists, propping up George Bush and his blindly loyal Republican Congress.
It was they who continuously told America that George Bush was the reincarnation of the Great American Conservative Hero Ronald Reagan and the Great Warrior Defender of Freedom Winston Churchill all wrapped up in one glorious, powerful package. It was this same conservative movement—now pretending to lament the abandonment of conservatism by Bush and the Congress—that was the single greatest source of Bush’s political support, that twice elected him and propped up his presidency and the movement that followed it.
So why, after six years of glorifying George Bush and devoting their full-fledged loyalty to him and the Hastert-and-DeLay-controlled Congress are conservatives like Lowry, Limbaugh, and Gingrich suddenly insisting that Bush is an anti-conservative and the GOP-led Congress the opposite of conservative virtue? The dynamic is as obvious as it is corrupt. They are desperately trying to disclaim responsibility for the disasters that they wrought in the name of “conservatism” by repudiating the political figures whom they named as the standard-bearers of their movement but whom America has now so decisively rejected.
George Bush has not changed in the slightest. He is exactly the same as he was when he was converted into the hero and icon of the conservative movement. The only thing that has changed is that Bush is no longer the wildly popular president that conservatives sought to embrace, but instead is a deeply disliked figure, increasingly detested by Americans, from whom conservatives now wish to shield themselves. And in this regard, these self-proclaimed great devotees of conservative political principles have revealed themselves to have none.
When he was popular, George Bush was the embodiment of conservatism. Now that he is rejected on a historic scale, he is the betrayer of conservatism. That is because “conservatism”—while definable on a theoretical plane—has come to have no practical meaning in this country other than a quest for ever-expanding government power for its own sake. When George Bush enabled those ends, he was the Great Conservative. Now that he impedes them due to his unprecedented unpopularity, he is the Judas of the conservative movement.
What is going on here, quite transparently, is a rehabilitation project. Bush’s presidency cannot be salvaged, but the reputation of conservatives and conservatism can be—though only by separating the former from the latter. Given Bush’s policies—massive increases in federal spending (including discretionary domestic spending), wildly expanding deficits, drastically increased domestic surveillance powers, and foreign wars fought ostensibly to export American values—there is and always has been a strong case to make that the Bush administration adhered to very few of the defining tenets of political conservatism, at least as it exists in theory. For that reason, had a substantial cohort of conservatives insisted upon distinguishing between Bush and conservatism when the Bush presidency was an epic success, the argument that the president is not a “true conservative” would have been reasonable. During Bush’s high-flying years, however, conservatives overwhelmingly claimed him as one of their own. Further, even as Bush’s popularity ratings tumbled, his remaining loyal supporters were preponderantly self-identified conservatives.
According to Pew, in March 2006, the president’s approval ratings had plummeted to an all-time low of just 33 percent. But a robust 78 percent of self-identified “conservatives” continued to approve of his job performance.
Thus, it is disingenuous, to put it generously, for right-wing activists to disclaim Bush so belatedly as a member of the fold, for it is the “conservative” movement that is centrally responsible for Bush’s presidency. Until his popularity plunged steeply and irrevocably, they claimed him as one of their own and engineered both of his electoral victories.
Means exist for political movements to eject the leaders they choose in the event that those leaders stray from the “right beliefs.” In 1976, Gerald Ford was the Republican president, but conservatives believed he was insufficiently conservative: so they supported the primary challenge of Ronald Reagan.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter was the Democratic president, but liberals believed he was insufficiently liberal, so they supported the primary challenge of Ted Kennedy. As The Washington Monthly recounted: “By 1980, many liberals were in open revolt against Carter, abandoning him to support Ted Kennedy’s ultimately-doomed primary challenge even as the public was sending unmistakable signals that it was sick of Kennedy-style big government.”
In 1992, the first George Bush was the Republican president, but many conservatives believed he was insufficiently conservative, so they supported the primary challenge of Pat Buchanan. As New York Times columnist William Safire described it at the time: “Buchanan is using the Republican primary campaign in 1992 as the springboard for his long-range plan to wrest control of the party from hawkish neoconservatives and pragmatic moderates. Right from the start, he was a Goldwater ‘true believer,’ never happy with the necessary compromises of Nixon and Reagan.”
George W. Bush, however, with very rare exception, was enthusiastically embraced by conservatives—in his 2000 primary fight against John McCain, in the 2000 general election, and again in the 2004 general election. Conservatives made George Bush (and the individuals who controlled Congress) the standard-bearer of their political movement for the last six years, and there was little attempt to separate conservatism from the president or from the GOP leadership embodied by Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay. The handful of right-wing figures who insisted that the Bush presidency deviated fundamentally from political conservatism—a Pat Buchanan here or an Andrew Sullivan there—were castigated and declared not to be “real conservatives” solely by virtue of their refusal to support George Bush’s policies.
Who, then, are the ostensible “real conservatives” who were repudiating George Bush and the GOP Congressional leaders when Bush’s approval ratings were respectable? Is it Mitt Romney, who in 2004 hailed “the courageous and compassionate leadership of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney”? Is it Rick Santorum, who solemnly told Americans: “every generation has but a moment to carry the torch that defines who we are and what we will be,” and then identified who he thinks will do that for conservatives: “George Bush has shown his compassion by advancing his faith-based initiatives, strengthening marriage, and fighting to let the American people define marriage, not left-wing judges”?
Perhaps it is Rush Limbaugh, who, at the time of Reagan’s 2004 death, said: “Reagan was right just as George W. Bush is today, and I really believe that if Reagan had been able he would have put his hand on Bush’s shoulder and say to him, ‘Stay the course, George.’ I really believe that.” Or James Dobson, who boasted of the critical role played by conservatives in re-electing George Bush: “According to Dobson, evangelical Protestants played a major role in re-electing President George W. Bush, giving him a ‘great mandate.’” And in May 2003, longtime conservative pundit Bob Novak called Bush “a president who may be more basically conservative than Ronald Reagan.”
The leading right-wing political magazine, National Review—with the aforementioned Rich Lowry at the helm—in 2004 told its readership about George Bush and “conservatism”: “In his bid for re-election, George W. Bush deserves the support of conservatives.” Although the editors acknowledged that “mistakes” were made, they said that “Bush has shown evidence of being able to learn from his mistakes. We have made political strides in Iraq.” While noting the “legitimate conservative criticisms that can be made of his record,” they also wrote that “Bush deserves conservative support, as well, on domestic issues.” Thus, “For conservatives…backing Bush’s re-election should be an easy decision.”
During the years of 2002 through 2004, George Bush was venerated like few other presidents, spoken of in terms so reverent that at times it seemed almost improper to criticize him. And it was American conservatives leading these virtual canonization rituals. Such a sudden “recognition” that Bush is not a true conservative, then, is transparently prompted by the collapse of the Bush presidency, by the collective realization that he has been an epic failure, and the consequent desire to shield conservatism from the toxic fallout.
Independent of the abstract debate as to whether George Bush has governed as a “conservative” in some theoretical, academic sense of that term, the near-complete reversal in how right-wing leaders speak of George Bush is simply remarkable. The fundamental reversal reveals the extent to which the Bush presidency has become so politically poisonous that even his own supporters now fear being held responsible for its legacy.
DESTROYING THE REPUBLICAN BRAND
The abandonment of the president is so cataclysmic that it is actually reshaping the American political landscape. A March 2007 Pew poll revealed some truly startling findings. George Bush’s unpopularity was literally driving Americans away in droves from the Republican Party. Bush was single-handedly coming close to destroying the Republican brand. Whereas in 2002 the percentage of Americans who identified or leaned toward one of the parties was split almost evenly (43–43 percent), Democrats had opened up a huge gap after six years of the Bush presidency. According to Pew, 50 percent of Americans now identify as or lean toward the Democratic Party, while Republicans attract only 35 percent. As the Los Angeles Times put it in reporting on the Pew findings:
Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged during George W. Bush’s presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political victories, a major survey has found.
The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People the Press, found a “dramatic shift” in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, 50% of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, whereas 35% aligned with Republicans….
“Iraq has played a large part; the pushback on the Republican Party has to do with Bush, but there are other things going on here that Republicans will have to contend with,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center. “There is a difference in the landscape.”
Political journalist Rod Dreher is as conservative as an individual can be—a longtime contributor to National Review, a self-described “practicing Christian and political conservative,” and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. Yet his rejection of George Bush and Bush’s vision of America is now complete, and the reasoning that led him to that point is shared by many other Americans who previously supported the president.
In January 2007, Dreher recorded an extraordinary oral essay for National Public Radio in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs he has held since childhood. Dreher, forty, explains that his “first real political memory” was the 1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He states that he “hated” Jimmy Carter for “shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence.” When Reagan was elected, Dreher believed “America was saved.” Reagan was “strong and confident.” Democrats were “weak and depressed.”
In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he “disliked hippies—the blame-America-first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists back then just like they want to do now.” In short, to Dreher, Republicans were “winners.” Democrats were “defeatists.” On September 11, Dreher’s first thought was: “Thank God we have a Republican in the White House.” The rest of his essay recounts his political transformation as a result of the Bush presidency:
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq War have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn forty next month—middle aged at last—a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.
I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative—that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take presidents and generals at their word—that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot—that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.
Dreher’s essay is extreme and intense but also increasingly commonplace and illustrative. The unparalleled magnitude of the disaster that President Bush has wrought on this country will carry a profound impact on American strength and credibility for a long, long time to come and also on the views of Americans—including many conservatives—toward their political leaders and, almost certainly, toward the Republican Party.
Yet another illustrative example is Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who was not only a supporter of the war in Iraq but also one of two journalists invited to a secret meeting with senior Bush Defense Department officials in November 2001 at which the participants strategized on ways to persuade the president of the need to invade Iraq. But by 2006, Zakaria had turned against the administration almost completely, and by the middle of the year was issuing sweeping condemnations of both Bush and the legacy of his presidency:
Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington’s as
sumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.
Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush’s legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I’m sure he takes full responsibility.
The enormity of the damage Bush has done to America is reflected by the palpable change in the content as well as the tone of our political dialogue. By the end of 2006, op-ed themes such as historian Douglas Brinkley’s in the Washington Post became commonplace. Brinkley is a highly regarded presidential historian, having written books about Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and John Kennedy.
In his first paragraph, Brinkley recounts a meeting he had with Reagan biographer Lou Cannon: “Like many historians these days, we discussed whether George W. Bush is, conceivably, the worst U.S. president ever.” While Cannon “bristled” at the idea, he did so, according to Brinkley, not because anything in Bush’s presidency thus far precludes such an assessment, but only because, with two years left, declaring Bush “the worst” was premature. After all, unforeseen events could unfold in such a way as to improve Bush’s standing.
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency Page 5