MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson wrote an interesting item (.pdf) last week for the Cato Institute, a libertarian/conservative think tank, highlighting a fairly-familiar refrain: Bush hasn’t failed because he’s conservative; he failed because he’s not conservative.
Bush’s claims of small government conservatism were a crock.
This administration has not stood up for the principles of liberty. With a few exceptions — the withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and the tax cuts are both good things we would not have gotten under a Democratic president — this president has not stood up for small government. There was no remark from the Bush administration of any kind after the decision in the Kelo eminent domain case. This administration has done virtually nothing for school choice. It took the wrong side in the University of Michigan case on diversity, essentially saying that government has an interest in promoting diversity for its own sake — not as a means of redressing past discrimination, but simply because multicolored is better than monochromatic. That is almost an aesthetic position. Bush signed a campaign finance regulation bill that he acknowledged was unconstitutional.
Again and again, this administration has turned down opportunities, even when they were not terribly costly politically, to stand on principle.
We’ve been hearing a lot of this lately. As Jonathan Chait recently noted, “The American Spectator recently published a special issue devoted mostly to detailing the litany of Bush sins. One recent book (Impostor, by conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett), a forthcoming book (Conservatives Betrayed, by right-wing activist Richard Viguerie), and innumerable op-eds (e.g., ‘How the GOP lost its way,’ by Reagan biographer Craig Shirley) condemn the president as an ideological turncoat.”
At first blush some of this might appear reasonable. Aside from some federal judges, Bush hasn’t delivered much in the way of conservative successes. Perhaps, as conservatives argue, Bush’s presidency would at least be guided by a relative coherence if he’d embraced a conservative approach and stuck to it. Instead he raised spending and increased the size of the federal government.
Or maybe not. Like Alan Wolfe, I’m afraid much of this tack, and most of Tucker Carlson’s missive, sounds a great deal like a poli sci class in which several die-hards insist that communism has never really been tried.
Conservative dissidents seem to have done an admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of their claims. Of course, many of these dissidents extolled the president’s conservative leadership when he was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted with the failures of communism in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism had never been tried. If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.
….If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government — indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government — is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.
Republicans took control of the entire federal apparatus, conservative ideology reigned, and the far-right dream failed miserably. But following up on Wolfe’s point, the right doesn’t want to blame their ideology — so they blame ours for the GOP’s failure. It’s led to this bizarre situation in which the right is left arguing that Bush is a big-government liberal.
Note to conservatives: we don’t want him either.