 Roman Genn |
 COVER STORY
The Politics of Everyman
George W. Bush, American — and his mélange of influences
JOHN O’SULLIVAN
During the 2004 election campaign, I was invited to take part in a BBC discussion of the nature of the Bush presidency. It was a lively debate, but I was miscast. The BBC wanted a conservative defender of the president, and my main argument was that Bush wasn’t a conservative. Experience has since taught me the futility of trying to demonstrate this.
Conservatives don’t need telling. Most already know it and can readily list the president’s liberal sins — his overspending, his gutting of education reform to win the support of Teddy Kennedy, his wink and nod to the Supreme Court to defend racial preferences, his quintupling of federal funds for bilingual education, his creation of a new drug entitlement program, etc., etc.
But non-conservatives (and especially liberals) find the concept of a non-conservative George W. Bush utterly impossible to grasp. In the radio debate the man from the Guardian heard me out and then, trying to make sense of an argument he clearly thought deranged, said in a kindly way: “Yes, John is quite correct. Bush isn’t a conservative. He’s a right-wing radical.”
Bush is, of course, nothing of the sort. No definition of a right-wing radical, however broad, can possibly be reconciled with the list of Bush’s Left-progressive policies cited above. When pressed for evidence to support their claims, liberal critics have to fall back on the Iraq invasion.
Now, the invasion of Iraq can be reasonably described as radical. But there is nothing particularly right-wing about dislodging a fascist dictator on grounds that combined democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, opposition to nuclear proliferation, and the enforcement of U.N. resolutions. Indeed, the case for the Iraq invasion is a litany of liberal-interventionist beliefs. That perhaps explains why almost every prominent Democrat except for Barack Obama (who hadn’t been elected to the Senate yet) supported the invasion (and why many right-wing radicals such as Pat Buchanan were firmly opposed to it).
So if Bush is neither a conservative nor a right-wing radical, could he then be, ahem, a liberal progressive? It is tempting to argue that case (and I have done so in the past), but the list of the Bush administration’s conservative policies, though shorter than the list of its liberal ones, is still too substantial to ignore. Notable among them are tax cuts, judicial appointments, and pro-life policies on abortion and stem-cell research. Plainly, there is a conservative thread in the Bush tartan.
Could it be a new sort of “compassionate conservatism”? In 2003 Labor Day remarks to the Ohio Operating Engineers, Bush said: “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” The remark was subsequently reflected in policies on poverty, immigration, democracy promotion, faith-based initiatives, foreign aid, and much else. It reflects something elemental in Bush’s personality. But what exactly?
My initial response to compassionate conservatism was to feel that it was redundant, vain, and self-serving. It was redundant because relieving poverty and improving the condition of the people have been important strands of every conservatism since Edmund Burke. It was vain because it indulged in an act of moral self-congratulation. And it was self-serving because it suggested that all other conservatisms were lacking in compassion.
So I felt that the Pharisee who proclaimed in the temple: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week. I give tithes of all that I possess” (Luke 18:11–12) was the first compassionate conservative.
But it turns out I was looking on the bright side.
Definitions and elaborations of the concept are not to be expected from Bush personally. As philosophers go, he is the strong, silent type. Besides, he and others have granted the credit for this theme to the president’s first chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, who subsequently joined the Washington Post as a columnist and wrote a book, Heroic Conservatism, to advance the doctrine. And in his various writings and speeches, Gerson is not so much morally condescending to other conservatisms as downright hostile.
His particular bête noire is what he calls “libertarian conservatism” or “small-government conservatism.” In a seminar held by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Gerson defined his heroic/compassionate model specifically as “a rejection of libertarian and traditional anti-government ideology in favor of a conservatism of the common good influenced by Catholic social thought. It tries to take the principles of solidarity with the poor and the weak seriously.” Gerson also claims to “take the principle of limited government seriously” by employing mediating institutions rather than government bureaucracy to achieve his vision of social justice.
To begin with, the idea that libertarian conservatism ignores or despises the poor is a libel. Some eccentric libertarians may do so, but the single most distinguished and influential libertarian conservative in our lifetime was the late Milton Friedman. His focus was on limiting government power — in everything from budgetary policy to narcotics regulation — but Friedman was also the inventor of the negative income tax, education vouchers, and a thousand other schemes to lift people out of poverty.
Second, there is nothing in compassionate conservatism to compel governments to prioritize. All the pressures in government are to finance new social projects (especially when opposing them is the sign of a hard heart). Without the restraint of a “small government” ideology, the easiest course is to choose them all. Overspending, inflation, spiraling deficits, and finally severe fiscal retrenchment are the results. But maybe that point need not be stressed just at present.
Third, compassionate conservatism is myopic. It responds to the victims in view but ignores the invisible victims of its generosity. Thus, the white-male victims of affirmative action are not considered in its debates about racial preferences. Bush’s proposed immigration reforms ignored the interests of low-paid, often minority, Americans. Prudent savers today are enduring the economic consequences of policies designed to help imprudent non-savers. And, of course, the taxpayer is the ultimate invisible victim of this cumulative warm-heartedness. As William Graham Sumner said, compassion is A getting together with B to decide what C shall do for X.
In other words, compassionate conservatism is less a political philosophy than a romantic cult of sensibility. It responds to “suffering situations” but lacks mechanisms for preferring one project to another or for setting an overall limit on government. Thus it liberated the president to “move” when “somebody hurts” without first calculating the consequences.
But isn’t that how most voters feel? Political scientists often point out that most voters believe the same things — but also that those beliefs change, often quite rapidly, in response to events. Except for the political extremes, Americans lack an ideology that forces them to restrain their impulses, reconcile conflicting values, or maintain a stable policy. And being generous people, when somebody hurts, they move.
If a government acts on the same basis, its policies will be a patchwork quilt of left and right measures. And, to paraphrase Errol Flynn on his own economics, its net income will be insufficient to cover its gross habits.
As his record shows, Bush is simply the ordinary American writ powerful.
There is even some evidence that he sees things that way. Just recently, talking to a group of sympathetic journalists, he launched into a fierce defense of Harriet Miers, arguing that she was a decent and able Texas lawyer scorned by the legal elites of the Ivy League. She would have brought a commonsense approach to the Supreme Court. Etc., etc.
So is Bush — gasp! — a populist?
Not really. Populism is the idea that ordinary Americans are politically wiser and more realistic than elites. That is probably true — and certainly so today when our elites are cosseted against reality and thus more likely to be dupes of ideological fashion. Bush, however, was a cafeteria populist. He gained politically from being seen as an ordinary American. He occasionally talked populism. But he also proved quite capable of resisting the people’s wisdom when it clashed with his moral certainties. He gave undeviating support (on compassionate grounds) for a “comprehensive” immigration reform that was supported by business (and other) elites and twice defeated by popular resistance. When elite opinion clashed with popular wisdom, he chose the side that echoed his inner evangelical impulses.
All presidencies are shaped powerfully by the president’s personality. But the Bush presidency seems more personal, even impulsive, and less influenced by either party or ideology than most. In which case the quality of Bush’s personality becomes all-important. And just as compassionate conservatism lacks a guiding “governor,” so the Bush personality seems to lack a similar mechanism of impulse control. Sometimes his impulses are right, notably the surge; sometimes mistaken, notably immigration; almost always they prevail.
Which is why the best description of the Bush presidency was formulated almost 100 years ago by the great Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock: “He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”
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