The Conservative Case Against Bush
Ubiquitous
After six years of President Bush--thought by nearly every observer to be
the most socially conservative president of recent decades--where does
social conservatism stand? No one can deny there have been some bright
spots: the defeat of the Democrats' Senate leader Tom Daschle in 2004, the
nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito to the Supreme Court
in 2005, a few successful state referendums in 2006.
What isn't so clear is what it all amounts to. The noise has been
overwhelming since George W. Bush took office. Abortion, euthanasia, stem
cells, public Christmas displays, same-sex marriage, pornography in the
movies, faith-based initiatives, immigration, visible patriotism: We've been
warned by the media, over and over again, that Republicans are reshaping
America into a Puritan's paradise. But at the end of the day, the media
mostly won and the Republicans mostly lost. Social conservatism is in little
better shape now than it was when Bush was first elected. In many ways, it
is in worse shape.
In truth, no branch of conservatism has prospered much under Bush,
particularly since the beginning of the Iraq War. Economic conservatives
have had several victories, particularly with tax cuts, but on their
fundamental worries about bloated government spending, they've been routed.
From 2000 to 2006, the Republican Congress proved as financially
undisciplined as its Democratic predecessors--and occasionally even less
disciplined, as the prescription-drug entitlement and Katrina relief showed.
And that's to say nothing about the scandals involving Tom Delay, Jack
Abramoff, Mark Foley and all the rest. The Gingrich Republicans used the
long parade of congressional corruption to help defeat the Democrats in
1994, but they seemed all too ready to join it themselves once they had held
power for a few years.
Even the neoconservatives have suffered. The original agitators for the
toppling of Saddam Hussein--and the first to see clearly the threat of
global jihadism--they seemed to the media to have gotten what they wanted
with the invasion of Iraq. But the Bush administration did not give them the
kind of war, much less the kind of peace, for which they had called.
Why, these days, should the Sudanese government fear the United States will
intervene to halt the slaughter in Darfur? Why should the Iranians worry
about an American strike against their development of nuclear bombs? Shortly
after the success of the initial invasion of Iraq, Libya announced it would
dismantle its weapons of mass destruction. It's hard to imagine any Middle
Eastern country doing the same now. Since 2003, the neoconservatives have
been the whipping boys of a left invigorated by the floundering Bush
administration--all while that same administration has systematically
rejected their policy suggestions, culminating in the disheartening
appointment of the self-proclaimed realist Robert Gates as the nation's new
secretary of defense.
So why were conservatives supposed to cheer the president's State of the
Union address this January? If we haven't yet demonstrated to the world that
we can successfully oppose the jihadists, if we haven't yet brought
government spending under control, if we haven't yet established any
permanent advances on the life issues--if all that Republican government has
successfully managed over the past six years is to inspire a rabid
opposition at home and abroad--then many opportunities have been squandered.
Every conservative I know is depressed these days, and they are right to be.
Under President Bush, conservatism has won only in the sense of not losing
as quickly as it would have under a President Gore or a President Kerry.
The common turn among commentators, once they've recognized Mr. Bush's
weakness, has been to declare the betrayal of some form of authentic
conservatism. In book after book--from Bruce Bartlett's "Impostor" and
Patrick Buchanan's "State of Emergency" to Jeffrey Hart's "The Making of the
American Conservative Mind" and Richard Viguerie's "Conservatives
Betrayed"--a number of self-declared conservatives have announced the
apostasy and treachery of George W. Bush. Thus Mr. Bush is an ideologue
where sincere conservatives are pragmatists. Or Mr. Bush is a spendthrift
where true conservatives are budget-balancers. Or Mr. Bush is an
expansionist where genuine conservatives are isolationists. Or Mr. Bush is a
religious believer where real conservatives are religious skeptics.
Some of these commentators, particularly the economic conservatives, have
valid complaints, though like the rest of us they must face the fact that
things would have been even worse under a Democratic administration. But
their conclusion that the White House has flown under false colors is
ludicrous. In all that he has tried to do--reform education, fix Social
Security, restore religion to the public square, assert American greatness,
appoint good judges--Mr. Bush has proved himself a conservative. Of course,
along the way, he has also proved himself hapless. The problem isn't his
lack of conservatism. The problem is his lack of competence.
Apart from the still not certain pro-life views of the two new Supreme Court
justices, where is there a major success to which one can point? In the
opening days of his presidency, Mr. Bush declared that the return of
government support for faith-based institutions would be the great legacy of
his administration--as well it might have been, if the whole thing had not
quickly collapsed into a clown show of political missteps, fumbled chances
and administrative infighting so vicious that the director of the
faith-based office eventually took to the pages of Esquire to denounce his
co-workers as a bunch of "Mayberry Machiavellis."
Stem cells are perhaps the exception, for there President Bush did indeed
hold the conservative line. It is worth remembering, however, the way in
which he did so: Letting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research
become a public crisis when quicker action would have kept it off center
stage. By allowing it to boil over, the administration allowed its opponents
to shift the focus off abortion, where the pro-life movement seemed to be
gradually winning, and onto embryonic stem cells, where the nation has yet
to be convinced. There's a reason the word "abortion" was never spoken from
the podium of the 2004 Democratic Convention, while the phrase "stem cells"
was trumpeted dozens of times. Correct action, even when strongly
undertaken, is not the same thing as persuasive leadership.
Regardless, little else comes to mind. President Bush was absolutely right
that Social Security is a looming disaster, and as a result of his efforts,
Social Security reform is now dead for a generation. The White House saw
clearly that education in this country needs a complete overhaul, and we got
as a consequence only the bureaucratic annoyance of the No Child Left Behind
Act. The Republicans' lack of political savvy abandoned an astonishing
number of unconfirmed judicial nominees--and now we have a Democratic Senate
unlikely to confirm any conservative judges at all.
Many things contributed to the Democrats' victory in the 2006 election, but
by any reckoning, a considerable part came from the electorate's unhappiness
with the situation in Iraq. So what, then, are conservatives to make of the
war?
This much seems certain: If the United States loses in Iraq, the
consequences will be incalculably bad. Indeed, those consequences will come
even if the war is won, as long as the perception remains that it has been
lost. For all the absurdity of the media's endless comparisons of Iraq to
Vietnam, the parallel here seems exact: We will not be helped by
recognizing, years later, that the struggle was going better than it seemed
at the time. Nearly every historian now realizes that the Tet Offensive was
a military disaster for the North Vietnamese. The American belief that our
opponents had won, however, proved a sufficient political triumph to swell
the antiwar movement. From that moment on, Vietnam was over. Eventually, we
admitted defeat and abandoned our allies--with the Cambodian killing fields,
the Cuban adventure in Angola, and the Soviets' invasion of Afghanistan all
following like dominoes through the 1970s.
Things at home were little better. For conservatives, the 1970s stand as the
nadir of American social history--the "decade of nightmares," in Philip
Jenkins's phrase. This was the era that installed the media culture of
suspicion, surrendered the nation's cities to crime zones, suffered
double-digit inflation, nationalized the sexual revolution, and gave us Roe
v. Wade. Direct cause and effect for such things are always difficult to
decide, but, in one way after another, we were demoralized for a decade
after America's defeat in Vietnam.
The consequences of American defeat in Iraq are likely to be similar. Around
the globe, the jihadists will be inspired to greater and greater
violence--as the "lesson of Iraq" keeps any U.S. government, Democrat or
Republican, from committing troops to a foreign struggle. The weaker
opponents of radical Islam will quickly become even more vulnerable. Can
southern Sudan hold without at least the distant intimidation of American
military intervention? Can Nigeria? Can Indonesia? Terrorism, too, will
surely expand as a chastened United States finds it cannot realistically
threaten such nations as Syria, Iran and North Korea with military
consequences for supporting terrorist organizations.
Domestically, a large range of conservatives will seem discredited by an
American defeat in Iraq, which is why their liberal and radical opponents so
quickly, and fecklessly, embraced the claim that Iraq is lost. On crime,
abortion, education, government spending--the whole litany of domestic
concerns--the American conservative movement may well find itself starting
over, back once again where it was in 1974. The result will be perhaps most
disheartening for social conservatives, as decades of intellectual and
political gains against abortion are frustrated.
And the fact we must face is this: We have already been defeated in Iraq.
Perhaps not in literal truth; a better policy, better implemented, might yet
bring about a stable, democratic country. And certainly not in historical
terms; Iraq is only an early chapter in what must be a long struggle against
global jihadism. But, at the very least, the battle for perception of the
Iraq War has gone entirely against the United States. In the eyes of both
the American public and the Islamic world, we have lost--and lost badly.
The reason is President Bush. His administration has mishandled the
logistics of the war and the politics of its perception in nearly equal
measure, from Abu Ghraib to the execution of Saddam Hussein. Conservatives
voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because they expected him to be the
opposite of Bill Clinton--and so, unfortunately, he has proved. Where Mr.
Clinton seemed a man of enormous political competence and no principle, Mr.
Bush has been a man of principle and very little political competence. The
security concerns after the attacks of September 11 and the general tide of
American conservatism carried Republicans through the elections of 2002 and
2004. But by 2006 Bush had squandered his party's advantages, until even the
specter of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House was not enough to keep the
Republicans in power.
To abandon Iraq now would be the height of irresponsibility. It would lock
in place the perception of defeat, with all the predictable consequences,
and it would abandon the Iraqis to whom we promised freedom and democracy.
President Bush has clearly done the right thing in refusing retreat and
pledging to stay the course in Iraq.
But hasn't that always been the problem? Again and again, he has done the
right thing in the wrong way, until, at last, his wrongness has overwhelmed
his rightness. How can conservatives continue to support this man in much of
anything he tries to do? Iraq is not America's failure, and it is not
conservatism's failure. We are where we are because of George W. Bush's
failure.
All the 2008 Republican presidential candidates should understand the task
they face over the next two years. George Bush's ideals have gotten him
elected president twice, and his incompetence has finally delivered the
Congress to his domestic opponents and empowered his nation's enemies
abroad. Iraq needs an American president who embraces Bush's principles--and
rejects his policies. The United States needs much the same thing.
* Mr. Bottum is editor of First Things, in whose March issue this article
appears. Tomorrow: Michael Novak
* makes the case for President Bush.