How Bush wrecked conservatism

The American right has embraced Bush's catastrophic war in the name of "moral clarity." But where is it written that conservatives have to be stupid?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Conservatives, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

Oct. 23, 2007 | Once again, major fissures in American conservatism have appeared. Leaders of the Christian right, appalled that a pro-choice, thrice-married candidate, Rudy Giuliani, is leading in the polls, have threatened to lead a mass defection from the GOP ranks and support a third-party presidential bid in 2008. Few expect them to make good on their threat. If they leave, they'll cost the Republicans the election; loyalty will almost certainly prevail. But the real issue isn't the loyalty of the hardcore religious right, who may never find another candidate so congenial as Bush to their fundamentalist beliefs and reactionary agenda. It's the inexplicable loyalty of that majority of American conservatives who are not driven solely by biblical fervor. The real question is: After seven years of George W. Bush, why would any genuine conservative still support his party?

Bush's presidency has made a shambles of real conservatism. Let's leave aside the issues on which liberals and conservatives can be expected to disagree, like his tax cuts for the rich, expansion of Medicare or his position on immigration, and focus solely on ones that should be above partisan rancor -- ones involving the Constitution and all-American values. On issue after Mom-and-apple-pie issue, from authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching a self-destructive war, Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles -- far more, in fact, than any recent Democratic president. And he has been supported every step of the way by Republicans in Congress, who have voted in lockstep for his radical policies. None of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any of Bush's policies. They simply promise to execute them better.

The Bush presidency has damaged American civil society in many ways, but one of the most lasting may be its destructive effect on conservatism. Even those who do not call themselves conservatives must acknowledge the power and enduring value of core conservative beliefs: belief in individual agency and responsibility, respect for American institutions and traditions, a resolute commitment to freedom, a willingness to take principled moral stands. It is a movement that draws its inspiration from towering figures: Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke. It stands for caution in foreign adventures, fiscal sobriety and a profound respect for tradition.

Or at least it used to stand for those things. Today's conservatism is a caricature of that movement: It embraces pointless wars, runs up a vast debt, and trashes the Constitution. Selling out their principles for power, abandoning deeply seated American values and traditions simply because someone on "their side" demanded that they do so, conservatives have made a deal with the devil that has reduced their movement to an empty, ends-obsessed shell. How did the party of Lincoln end up marching under the banner of Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Ann Coulter?

To be sure, Bush is not single-handedly responsible for the sorry state that American conservatism finds itself in today. The movement has always been intellectually fractured, riven by contradictory beliefs. As George Nash pointed out in his classic "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America," from the beginning modern American conservatism has been divided between traditionalists and libertarians. Libertarians regard individual freedom as the highest good, support the free market, and oppose coercive government policies. Traditionalists regard virtue, not freedom, as the highest good, believe in a transcendental moral order and are wary of unfettered individualism. Despite attempts to "fuse" them, the two worldviews are fundamentally incompatible -- you either believe in surrendering to God and tradition or you don't. Time and again, conservative attempts to implement policies that do justice to both the movement's "freedom" and "virtue" wings have failed.

The classic example is the Republican embrace of supply-side economics, aka trickle-down economics, which holds that cutting taxes on the rich will result in money trickling down to everyone else. Starting with Ronald Reagan, Republicans adopted this economic policy because its insistence that getting rich is morally good satisfies the demands of both freedom and virtue. As events proved, and as its architect, David Stockman, famously acknowledged, supply-side economics failed miserably. But this did not prevent Reagan and all subsequent Republican presidents from claiming it worked, and continuing to pursue similar economic policies. Reagan raised taxes and expanded the federal government enormously, but he insisted that he had cut taxes and dismantled "big government."

Similarly, the moral impulse of conservatism has from the outset been caught in a welter of self-contradiction. When the Judeo-Christian injunction to help the less fortunate collides with the "I've got mine, Jack" ethos of Ayn Rand individualism, selfishness inevitably triumphs. Crony capitalism, corruption and unchecked greed have been the inevitable result. As a result, conservative morality in practice has been squeezed into an ever smaller, ever more theocentric core. The fact that the Christian right claims to stand at the pinnacle of American virtue is grotesque, but it's the logical consequence of the shriveling of conservative morality.

In one sense, George W. Bush's presidency represents the ugly culmination of all of these tendencies. But in a more important sense, it is a radical departure from earlier American conservatism. Bush has undermined core American institutions and values in ways that no previous president, Democratic or Republican, has ever done.

However much liberal critics (like this writer) might disagree with them, Republican presidents from Ford to Reagan to the elder Bush generally refrained from radically changing American institutions, law and values. They possessed some internal governor that prevented them from going too far, some deeply rooted sense of civic parameters. Like their Democratic counterparts, they kept faith with what the great British conservative Edmund Burke called the "settled tradition." There were occasional exceptions: The Iran-Contra scandal, in which an unelected cabal within the government arrogated to itself the right to make policy and ignore Congress, permanently stained Reagan's legacy. But not even Reagan's harshest critics would assert that this secretive, dissembling, autocratic episode was characteristic of his entire presidency. Bush, by contrast, has been secretive, dissembling and autocratic from the moment five Republican Supreme Court justices installed him in the White House -- and about far more important issues.

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