After Bushism
Tip Your Hat and Say Goodbye W. James Antle, editor at The American Conservative, had some thoughts on using Bush's bad standing (particularly after the Miers nomination) to reflect on conservatism.
There is of course more to the story than personality and red-blue political competition. Bush has identified, however imperfectly, with certain broad goals of the conservative movement: a culture of life, a constitutionalist judiciary, the ownership society versus the redistributive state, the provision of charity by churches and civil society rather than bureaucrats.
Unfortunately, Bush has also corrupted many of these causes. Even the partial privatization of Social Security now appears unlikely. Other potential free-market reforms were transformed into traditional big-government largesse. Medicare is in even worse financial condition following the addition of an unaffordable prescription-drug benefit. No Child Left Behind has increased spending, but done little to promote school choice and in the long term may prove similarly ineffective at raising standards. The faith-based initiative subsidizes religious charities as much as it unshackles them.
The president’s failures share a common root: the belief that big-government means can serve conservative ends. This error central to Bush’s politics. His presidential bid was being planned in Austin during the Gingrich meltdown, when it seemed that voters had recoiled from the most aggressive Republican assault against big government since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Aping Bill Clinton rather than Gingrich, Bush boosters ambitiously decided to try their own hand at a Third Way. - W. James Antle III
It is interesting how Antle emphasizes the free market, classical liberal approach. The free market approach, it seem by history, to encourage a small ownership class rather than an ownership society - which might more properly be described as Distributist or proprietarian.
I think Antle is right that it is a natural time for average conservatives to think about what's next. Paul Weyrich has been doing a series of articles on the Next Conservatism over at the Free Congress Foundation. He's invoking Taft and agrarianism, and new urbanism This is competing with J. Bottom's "New Fusionism" of bombs and morality.
The problem for conservatives is the same as on the left - no coherent ideology or worldview. Fusionism tried to strap together an anti-new Deal coalition into an Anti-Communist coalition - with moderate success politically. The "New Fusionism" of Bottom -while having a rasion d'etre in this age of political terrorism- goes against the instincts of conservatives and many Middle Americans. Weyrich's new conservatism is a distillation of the Old Fusionism. It doesn't yet have a compelling reason to exist - conservative writers may feel the need to reach out for something new in the failure of Bushism - but average Americans are not worried by it's failure. Suburban aspiring BoBos are not clamoring for a return to agrarian life. The rest of the middle and working class have access to a cheap credit which is allowing them to perpetuate a lifestyle to which they have some loyalty. Conservatives also have been living with a party that has consistently, when the chips are down, chosen an ideology of state capitalism above all else.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Politics
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