Excommunicating Bush
Greenwald: “The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a ‘real conservative.’ This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who — when his presidency looked to be an epic success — glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.”
This, of course, is what conservatives do. They like winners, and when a winner becomes a loser, as Bush has, they not only distance themselves from that loser, they excommunicate that loser, making the case that the loser is a loser, or has become a loser, because he (or she, but usually he) isn’t, or never was, a genuine conservative, or has abandoned conservatism, or has succumbed — and this is the greatest heresy of all — to liberalism.
But of course this assumes that conservatism of monolithic, which it isn’t. There are many forms of conservatism — paleo-, neo-, social, corporate, libertarian, etc. — and these forms, or strands, are often incompatible with one another. What has held these forms of conservatism together is money and the desire for victory, as well as opposition to its mythical enemy, liberalism, and the “conservative movement” has over the last few decades been extremely successful both in holding together its disparate elements and, through the Republican Party, in winning at the polls.
And Bush was — and is — a conservative. He was celebrated by conservatives in 2000, he was essentially deified by them after 9/11, and much of his presidency — including but not limited to his tax cuts for the wealthy, his energy policies, his expansion of executive power, his efforts to privatize social security, and his theocratic policies on stem-cell research, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the like — has been dedicated to a specifically conservative agenda. Many conservatives may not approve of his position on immigration, but he has always been somewhat more “liberal” on that issue, as well as on education — his position on immigration, as Greenwald notes, is hardly new.
So why the “discontent”? Why the “rebellion”? “There is really only one thing that has changed about George W. Bush from the 2002-2004 era when conservatives hailed him as the Great Conservative Leader, and now. Whereas Bush was a wildly popular leader then, which made conservatives eager to claim him as their Standard-Bearer, he is now one of the most despised presidents in U.S. history, and conservatives are thus desperate to disassociate themselves from the President for whom they are solely responsible. It is painfully obvious there is nothing noble, substantive or principled driving this right-wing outburst; it is a pure act of self-preservation.”
Remember that Simpsons episode where Bart knocks over Krusty’s set and then says, “I didn’t do it”? Well, that’s basically what’s happening here. Conservatives are looking at Bush and saying, “We didn’t do it. He’s not one of us. He never was. So don’t blame us. In fact, if he was like us, he’d never have become such a failure.” It’s a way for conservatives to pretend that all is well with conservatism. It’s a way for them to lie to themselves, and to us, and to the media. “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed,” as Digby put it so well, explaining this phenomenon. The problem is, conservatism fails all the time. Whatever its many electoral successes, whatever its success in bullying the media into submission, it is becoming increasingly clear — and it should have been clear all along, and it was to many — that conservatism itself is a failure.
The massive failure of George W. Bush is just the most blatant expression of the decay and corruption in conservatism’s soul.
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26 Responses to “Excommunicating Bush”
Well, I quite strongly disagree with that.
I have never considered Bush to be a conservative. Bush hold some views that can be considered ‘conservative,’ but overall, he’s not. You say that there are many kinds of conservatism. True. So which one is Bush?
He is none of them.
Also – if you did more research you will find that many conservatives asked these questions when Bush was more popular than he is now. Years ago. That a lot of conservatives were power hungry and decided to ignore the elephant in the room (that Bush is not a conservative) does not make Bush a conservative.
It only makes the conservative movement powerhungry.
No, Bush is not a conservative.
Also – when I refer to someone as a ‘conservative’ I almost always mean ‘traditional conservative.’ When someone is a social conservative, I call that person a ‘social conservative,’ when someone is a fiscal conservative, I call that person a ‘fiscal conservative,’ etc.
I e-mailed Joe a loooooooooong time ago already that I did not undertand conservative support for Bush and that they started to complain that he’s not a conservative. I told Joe, he never was a conservative. Never. If you vote for a member of the religious right and big business elite, you shouldn’t expect to get a true conservative. It simply doesn’t work like that.
The more interesting question is: why did conservatives support Bush and why did they abandon their ideology?
‘f you vote for a member of the religious right and big business elite, you shouldn’t expect to get a true conservative. It simply doesn’t work like that.’
Bingo! Just as Left Wingers who support PC Fascism are not liberals, neither are anti-ab Christian nutbags and corporate bagboys conservatives. No con wd be for mucking around others’ bedrooms, nor wd they be for allowing corporations to run amok and trample civil rights of consumers.
I suppose this is one issue where Michael vdG and I are in serious disagreement. You say he’s not a conservative? Hmmm. He’s certainly a big business corporate conservative. (Or, put differently, a trickle-down conservative.) Consider his record on taxes and regulation, not to mention corporate handouts. And he certainly fashions himself an evangelical conservative. He may not have implemented the agenda of the religious right, but he has taken a hardline evangelical position on stem-cell research and he has expressed opposition to abortion. He has also appointed judges who are stridently conservative. Is that not a sign of his conservatism? And his foreign policy, which as realist conservative at the outset, went neoconservative after 9/11. And consider, too, his expansion of executive power, which is nothing if not an authoritarian form of conservatism.
Did some conservatives speak out against him even when he was popular? Sure, but not many. The vast majority of conservatives celebrated him — consider the cult of personality that was built around him early on in his presidency.
You may be right that Bush isn’t a “traditional” conservative, but, honestly, there aren’t many of those in the U.S. these days. The “paleos” are out. In the U.S. conservatism is more often associated with free-market neo-liberalism and/or evangelical Christianity. On these fronts, Bush is certainly a conservative.
Michael beautifully makes Greenwald’s point and another one as well about political label-holics:
Bush was worshipped by conservatives as The Second Frigging Coming because he was an empty vessel into which they could pour their ideologies even if he was not one of them in any “traditional conservative” sense.
That is, until the wall they gleefully helped build brick by brick came toppling down on them. Traditional conservatives are not a lot of things of which they are accused by others across the political spectrum, but in this instance they a rank hypocrites.
Of course you recognize that “conservative” is a relative term, but one of the casualties of our modern attitudes about language has been any traditional usage. Most political battles seem to be fought with undefined, poorly defined and maliciously defined terms and even being specific to the point of saying for instance, social conservative, is largely meaningless without further specificities about what alleged social conventions one wishes to be conservative about. People demanding a Christian nation and people demanding Jeffersonian secularism are both equally conservative in a way.
I think that the slight minority of voters who put Bush into office in 2000 felt that his snickering dislike of intellectualism and culture was conservative enough. The advocates of smaller, cheaper government weren’t about to call Clinton conservative for reasons unrelated to fiscal conservatism – at least in my opinion, yet one can argue that he was more conservative than Reagan.
All that I’m saying is that Liberal and Conservative are slippery, emotionally defined words having more to do with class identification and class warfare than with actual policy, so why worry whether Bush is conservative?
As to conservatives backing him; if you back a radical, were you really a conservative in the first place?
Michael is certainly no conservative when it comes to foreign policy and war. While Bush is not a conservative when it comes to *anything* and I’ve always thought that. I’ve often tried to argue with “conservatives” on just that point. Same with Clinton; he wasn’t exactly liberal.
In reality, conservative and liberal are more like team names than actual political philosophies.
Exactly
Michael you again do what people seem fond of doing; someone has a few conservative traits, thus that person is a conservative.
That’s not how it works or at least that’s not how it should work.
You have to understand that Bush played this game very well. What did he do? He called himself a compassionate conservative. A what? A compassionate conservative.
That should have triggered conservatives immediately. They should have understood that, what he actually was saying was “i have a few conservative traits, but I’m actually a Big Government and Big Business Republican.”
Shaun: o please – I have never been part of the Bush cult. I supported the war in iraq, but that was about it. As I have said on numerous occasions, I would not have voted for Bush, especially not in 00.
You could say that I am a conservative hawk. Slowly but surely, however, I am becoming more and more a traditional conservative. You should not forget that I am 22 years old. I am still learning. My views are still developing.
Anyway – I am what we call a conservative liberal, but that sadly doesn’t say Americans a lot.
Michael,
You might as well say you’re a Yankees/Red Sox fan.
If the distinction between liberal and conservative retains any meaning (and I am not sure it does), it
must reside in clearly different sets of assumptions about the world and principles about the proper role
of government in that world. To assume that Bush has a unified perspective on reality or than his actions reflect any principles whatsoever grants him far more
credit that he has earned. His narcissism makes Bill Clinton look like Mother Teresa. It is all about power and self gratification.
Stickings: ‘big business corporate conservative’.
You do realize that’s an oxymoron? A conservative is one who wishes to conserve resources- such as power or finances. The Big Biz boys are great on corporate welfare, and- as we know, anyone who is pro-welfare ain’t a con.
cos,
I suppose ‘big business corporate conservative’ could mean maintaining the status quo of increasing corporate welfare and power.
[...] But of course this assumes that conservatism of monolithic, which it isn’t. There are many forms of conservatism — paleo-, neo-, social, corporate, libertarian, etc. — and these forms, or strands, are often incompatible with one another. What has held these forms of conservatism together is money and the desire for victory, as well as opposition to its mythical enemy, liberalism, and the “conservative movement” has over the last few decades been extremely successful both in holding together its disparate elements and, through the Republican Party, in winning at the polls. (more…) [...]
Haha, wow, I always thought Michael was a cranky old man.
Glenn Greenwald lectures on what it means to be a conservative. Tomorrow, we have Christopher Hitchens lined up for what it means to be a Catholic. Menken’s trilogy is completed on Thursday when we bring Ahmed Huber in for a lecture on what it means to be Jewish.
co,
Glenn Greenwald is not lecturing on what it means to be a conservative. He is pointing out the hypocrisy of having said Bush is a model conservative when he’s popular, and then a few years later after he has fallen in the polls, saying he was a liberal all along.
Thanks, Chris since I can’t bring myself to actually read Greenwald.
I don’t doubt the column writers have had to flip-flop since they all push the rhetoric overboard to sell that day’s newspaper. Point taken as to them.
As for the average Joe conservative, however, I would imagine the skirmish in Mess-opotamia had a trumping effect on their earlier criticism.
“I have never considered Bush to be a conservative.”
MgvD, you lost me there. Maybe he’s not a rationale, intelligent consevative, but he definitly is a conservative. He is what you get when you take all the nuance out of conservative ideaology and replace it with the instinct of the wrongheaded. Just as some “Capitalists” think the word stands for totally unfettered trade/industry with no regulation whatsoever, the real deal is a bit more complicated than that and has to be to work.
He’s a conservative, just a dumb one. Like Rush, Hannity, Coulter et al….
Who was the last truly conservative president? Herbert Hoover? And we all know how well his presidency went. When the Great Depression hit he waited for the free market system to right the country, and refused to take any extraordinary measures to keep the banks from closing. He was a painful failure, just as Bush is a painful failure- Bush because he serves the wrong masters.
…
On Thursday October 24th, 1929, less than eight months into Herbert Hoover’s presidency and less than a year since he had been elected by the widest margin ever, the stock market crashed. Most experts, including Hoover, who had served brilliantly as the Secretary of Commerce for the two previous administrations, thought that the crash was part of a passing recession. But by the time the president wrote the first of these two letters, this one to his friend Governor Emmerson of Illinois, it had become clear that excessive speculation and a worldwide economic slowdown had plunged America into the midst of a Great Depression. While Hoover wrote in July 1931 that “considerable continuance of destitution over the winter,” and perhaps longer, was unavoidable, he was far from inactive in dealing with the problem. Since the crash, he had worked ceaselessly trying to fix the economy. He founded government agencies, encouraged labor harmony, supported local aid for public works, fostered cooperation between government and business in order to stabilize prices, and struggled to balance the budget. His work focused on indirect relief coming from individual states and the private sector. This focus can be seen in this letter in his emphasis on supporting “each state committee” and his stress on “appeals for funds” from outside the government, known as volunteerism.
As the Depression became worse, however, calls grew for more radical measures involving increased Federal intervention and spending. But Hoover refused, adhering strongly to his principles. While he was willing to use his influence to persuade business leaders to set moderate prices and employ more men, he refused to involve the Federal government in forcing fixed prices, controlling businesses, or manipulating the value of the currency, all of which he felt were steps towards socialism. And while he was inclined to give indirect aid to banks or local public works projects, he refused to use Federal money for direct aid to citizens, since he felt that the dole was un-American and would only further weaken public morale. He focused on volunteerism to raise money because he refused to engage in massive deficit spending, which he worried would only exacerbate the depression. These decisions allowed his opponents to paint Hoover as cold and uncaring toward the common citizen, even though he was in fact a philanthropist and a progressive before becoming president. During his reelection campaign, Hoover tried to convince Americans that the measures they were calling for might seem to help in the short term, but would be ruinous in the long run. In his speeches he asserted that he cared for common Americans too much to destroy the country’s foundations with deficits and Socialist institutions. But he could not escape the reputation of being both heartless and ineffectual, and was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/docs_archive/docs_archive_hoover.html
Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands-off-the-economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.”
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=4026
Roosevelt’s total subordination of his country’s welfare to his personal ambition began before he took office in March, 1933. The outgoing president, Herbert Hoover, confronted a dilemma. Faced with numerous bank failures throughout the country, Hoover wished to announce a plan to help promote bank solvency. He knew, however, that a statement from him would be worse than useless. He had utterly lost the confidence of Congress and the people.
He accordingly proposed to Roosevelt that he announce a plan to save the banks. Roosevelt refused to do so, since continued bank failures until he took office were to his political advantage. It would hardly do, would it, to have the banks recover under Hoover? Perish the thought! “On February 28 [1933], Hoover received a message that [Roosevelt adviser] Rexford Tugwell had said that the banks would collapse in a couple of days and that is what they wanted” (p. 22, emphasis in original). I leave aside here the issue of whether governmental action to end the bank panic was appropriate. Roosevelt himself favored such action: the point was not to allow Hoover credit for it.
Not an auspicious beginning, and matters soon got worse. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover as a spendthrift, and his platform promised strict economy in government. But a government that spent little would give Roosevelt scant opportunity to exercise the patronage he craved. Accordingly, “Roosevelt sent his now famous message to Congress deploring the disastrous extravagance of the Hoover administration…. As one reads that message now it is difficult to believe that it could ever have been uttered by a man who before ending his regime would spend not merely more money than President Hoover, but more than all the other 31 presidents put together three times more, in fact, than all the presidents from George Washington to Herbert Hoover” (p. 28, emphasis in original).
http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.asp?control=49&sortorder=issue
So may of you lefties not only get one thing after another wrong, you can’t even ask the right questions.
Why were Americans upset with Bush’s father, and what are we seeing now, even if Bush appears to refuse to duplicate his father 100%? To what extent are we seeing a repetition, and why was Dubya a candidate in 2000, anyway? At least try asking some good questions.
This sure looks like self delusion on the part of many conservatives.
It Bush’s approval rating were at 65%, it would be cheering and yelling: “See, what a vonservative president can do!. Let’s elect another just like him.”
His not being a true conservative would be a tiny footnote in all newspaper op-eds and blogs.
Hoover conservative? See Smoot-Hawley.
DLS- What are you trying to say- that Hoover was a better president than FDR?
As far as the bank story goes- it reminds me of how Jimmy Carter got no credit for helping to get the hostages released, despite hundred of hours negotiating over the phone. They came home right after Reagan’s inauguration -which is how Reagan planned it.
DLS- Are you one of those conservatives who wants to dismantle the New Deal? Because that “socialist” spending brought on the era of post-war prosperity and enlarged the middle class, as well as taking care of the elderly, who previously worked until they died if they had no savings. But you prefer Hoover???
I doubt W will do much after 2008, he can’t swing a hammer. I doubt if anyone will allow him to use their coattail to rehabilitate his legacy. He lacks the itillect of Nixon and the political savy of Clinton. I see a Howard Hughes breakdown at his Texas library and some pundits playing mecenary(Fred Barnes) at his “thunk tank”.