The Conservative Case Against Bush
His heart is in the right place, but he can't seem to do anything right.
BY JOSEPH BOTTUM
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
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.
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