Binge and Purge

In "The Man Who Would Be King," the late-nineteenth-century Rudyard Kipling story later turned into a movie, an English adventurer named Daniel Dravot becomes the regent of Kafiristan, a remote mountainous region north of India. Dravot leads the Kafiri people to a string of battlefield victories, and they receive him as a God, the son of Alexander the Great, and turn their treasure over to him. But then they see him bleed, and--discovering he is mortal after all--turn on him with unbridled rage. Mobs of tribesmen denounce him as a fraud, chase him out of the temple, and ultimately send him plummeting to his doom.Something similar is happening now to George W. Bush. Not long ago, conservatives hailed him as a fearless leader in the war on terrorism, a great man of history, Reagan's son. Long after the patriotic upsurge following September 11 had crested, the conservative base held him in awe. "George W. Bush has been a resolute and even heroic president in a terrifying time," wrote David Frum. Bush is "not only a good and trusted war leader, but a cunning and bold political leader," editorialized The Washington Times. Now his former acolytes are furiously denouncing him. The American Spectator recently published a special issue devoted mostly to detailing the litany of Bush sins. One recent book (Impostor, by conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett), a forthcoming book (Conservatives Betrayed, by right-wing activist Richard Viguerie), and innumerable op-eds (e.g., "how the gop lost its way," by Reagan biographer Craig Shirley) condemn the president as an ideological turncoat. Of course, conservatives have been demanding greater fidelity from Bush since he first ran for president. But that was all part of the normal give-and- take of conservative politics--the true believers staying ever-vigilant to ensure their three-quarters of a loaf does not get whittled down to half. What's happening now is different. Conservative intellectuals and activists, the right's ideological vanguard, have decided that Bush is not Reagan's son after all. Indeed, they have discovered that he is not, and never has been, a conservative, but rather that he is a fraud masquerading as one. The banishment of politicians from the tribe is a recurring practice on the right. George H.W. Bush was the most famous victim, but Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and many others have all faced the wrath of Washington conservatives. It is a highly stylized ritual, often conducted in terms baffling to those not deeply versed in the mores of the movement. It is also deeply cruel, as the victims are often faithful adherents who work assiduously to carry out the tribe's wishes--and they never see the mob coming for them until it's too late. In the especially strange case of Bush, we can begin by examining the new conservative claim that Bush is, like his father, a moderate. National Review's Jonah Goldberg has called Bush a "liberal Republican." Other conservatives make the same point implicitly, by way of historical comparison. The conservative press in recent weeks has been flush with ideological comparisons between the current president and George H.W. Bush or Richard Nixon, both of whom occupy a central place in the right's demonology. In the conservative mind, Bush has now joined his father and Nixon as ideological apostates who expanded government and sold out the movement in order to ingratiate themselves with liberals. It is, to say the least, a highly idiosyncratic analysis. Let us concede that the president has done violence to conservative principle with his tariffs, spending, and the like. Let us also concede, for the sake of argument, that Nixon and Bush pere can be considered "liberal." (They certainly are by contemporary Republican standards.) The comparison is still preposterous. Nixon and George H.W. Bush expanded government in the pursuit of goals amenable to many liberals. These included tougher environmental regulation and progressive tax reform in Nixon's case, and the Americans with Disabilities Act and an anti- deficit measure including tax hikes in Bush's. In sharp contrast, George W. Bush's expansions of government have, virtually without exception, come in the service of distinctly illiberal goals. Medicare, the energy bill, tariffs, crop supports--all these represented subsidies from the general public to business interests and attracted little or no support from liberals, with respectable Brookings centrist-liberals particularly aghast. Bush's right-wing corporatism may not reflect the kind of conservatism that most right-leaning activists prefer, but it is a kind of conservatism, and certainly not liberalism or moderation. There are two reasons the right has taken up this delirious interpretation. The first is that its adherents tend instinctively toward paranoia. (As David Brooks acutely observed a decade ago, "In the way that Eskimos are purported to have 39 words for snow, the right has a code to describe conservatives who ingratiate themselves with liberals.") When a Republican lets them down, their thoughts immediately turn to the dark prospect that he succumbed to the blandishments of the liberal elite. If Bush abandoned them to sign a big- government energy bill or steel tariff, The New York Times editorial page or Ted Kennedy must have been there whispering encouragements in his ear. (In another column, Goldberg saw in Bush's abandonment of conservatism the sinister hand of "moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing `mavericks,' centrists, and all the others who want to `get beyond labels' or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.") The second reflects a calculated attempt to absolve conservatives of Bush's failures. Look at the particulars of the indictment against the president. The conservatives' most bitter complaints concern Bush's "profligacy and total disregard for spending money judiciously," as Stephen Moore puts it in The American Spectator. But whose fault is that? As National Review editorialized in 2000, Bush's "support for tax cuts and Social Security reform is more important than his spending initiatives--not least because if he succeeds on taxes and Social Security, it will be easier to limit government in the future. " Moore himself in 2001 called tax cuts "the best way to stop a spending spree. " Blaming Bush for his betrayal is a way for conservatives to avoid an uncomfortable fact: He followed to a T the strategy they urged, and it failed. Nor are they willing to recognize that, when Bush disappointed them, he sometimes had no choice. One of the familiar tropes of the conservative shunning ritual is an almost pathological disregard for the realities of public opinion. Conservatives complain about Bush's Medicare expansion --which, indeed, was an atrocious piece of legislation--but their complaints center less on the law's design than its very existence. As the Republican Study Committee's Jeff Flake, who has drawn widespread conservative praise for his willingness to criticize Bush from the right, put it, "I never believed that it was responsible to create this new entitlement." Yet adding prescription drugs to Medicare was an overwhelmingly popular idea. Do conservatives imagine Bush could have won Florida in 2000, or any other swing state, if he opposed it? Do they think he could have won in 2004 after reneging on that promise? Likewise, they indignantly denounce Bush's failure to successfully privatize Social Security in 2005. As Robert Novak wrote, "The loss of the opportunity to expand the Republican base through massively increased stock ownership was squandered." It certainly wasn't for lack of trying, though. Bush campaigned tirelessly for privatization, even in the face of hostile and ever-worsening public opinion. (By April of 2005, voters--by nearly a 2-to-1 margin-- opposed replacing part of the guaranteed benefit with investment income, the core of Bush's plan.) Still, the president persevered long after failure was inevitable. In the face of his idea's massive unpopularity, what could he possibly have done differently? Conservatives aren't sure, but they insist that these compromises have cost Bush his popularity. ("If Bush held the Reaganite line on liberty at home the way he does on liberty abroad," wrote Goldberg, "he'd be in a lot better shape" in the polls.) To the right, it is axiomatic that any political failure can only have resulted from ideological deviation. Accordingly, conservatives have worked out their own interpretation of modern political history, in which every Republican triumph results from a GOP leadership that steadfastly upholds the conservative worldview and every defeat results from faint-hearted moderation. This interpretation is the source of the movement's strength. The conservative base is the domestic version of the "Arab Street"--a mercurial and potent force that must be constantly placated lest it explode in rage. And the way to placate it is by making concessions to the leaders who claim to speak for it. The notion that conservative defections are at the heart of Bush's polling problems is probably the most fantastical element of the whole conservative litany. And yet, oddly enough, mainstream reporters have eagerly and endlessly recycled the notion that conservative defections have crippled Bush in the polls. As The Washington Post reported recently, "Disaffection over spending and immigration have caused conservatives to take flight from President Bush and the Republican Congress at a rapid pace in recent weeks, sending Bush's approval ratings to record lows." At the elite level, it's certainly true that conservatives have deserted Bush. At the voter level, though, they remain loyal. Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz notes that, according to Gallup, from late April until mid-May, Bush's approval rating among conservative Republicans held steady, dipping imperceptibly from 79 to 77 percent. Over that same span, his approval among moderate or liberal Republicans disintegrated, dropping 20 points. News reports grasp onto the fact that Bush has lost support among Republicans, but the bulk of the collapse has occurred with the middle, not the right. To be sure, Bush would have higher ratings if he retained 100 percent support from his base. Yet, as Abramowitz points out, the distinctive thing about Bush's polls is how strongly his base supports him in comparison with the rest of the country. The split between how fellow partisans view Bush and how others view him is higher than any other such split recorded in the history of the Gallup poll. To have nearly 80 percent of conservative Republicans approve of Bush's job performance--at a time when approval among independents hovers around 20 percent--is a staggering triumph of party discipline. Since the conservative interpretation is so wildly at odds with reality, the only way to make it hold together is to retroactively define winners as ideological loyalists and losers as apostates. This technique describes the great bulk of political analysis found in the conservative media. Leading up to the 1998 congressional elections, for instance, Republicans in the House of Representatives had followed the fervent desires of the party base by launching impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Conservatives giddily anticipated the coming vote. "The November elections, as we noted last issue, will and should be a referendum on Bill Clinton. Republicans are likely to win it," editorialized National Review. As it happened, Republicans lost seats. National Reviews's political worldview, though, remained remarkably unchanged. "Republicans counted on money, incumbency, and one issue they refused even to mention: impeachment," observed a post-election editorial. "Is it any wonder that things didn't work out quite as well as they had hoped?" Well, it was a wonder to anybody who had taken National Review's analysis to heart. In retrospect, though, it was clear to the conservative magazine why the GOP had lost. Before, impeachment was going to produce victory. Now, they could see that the failure to emphasize impeachment caused defeat. Furthermore, they wrote in the same editorial, "Republicans offered no alternative agenda of their own. Most importantly, they let tax cuts languish." The lesson of the election, as with every election, was that Republicans defy the base at their peril. At any given moment, conservative activists are usually celebrating the top officials of the Republican Party while simultaneously demanding greater ideological fidelity from them. They are constantly hedging their bets so they can go either way with the clear-cut final determination. Today, conservatives "know" that George H.W. Bush sealed his fate when he abandoned Reaganism for mushy GOP centrism. Conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke expressed the movement's definitive judgment when he told a conservative gathering in late 1992, "We didn't lose this election.... Some people whose politics we can sort of tolerate lost this election." O'Rourke himself had tolerated Bush's politics well enough to appear at his campaign headquarters a few months earlier to buck up staff morale. In fact, the whole movement embraced Bush tightly during the campaign. And, when Bush embraced the right during his 1992 convention, Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent for The Washington Times, the movement organ, welcomed him back into the fold. "Whatever differences he may have with it around the edges, Mr. Bush embraces the core economic, cultural and national defense principles of his party's dominant right wing and they, in turn, have gathered around him," he wrote, predicting a Bush comeback victory that would shock the naysayers. With his loss of the election a few months later, though, Bush lost his welcome place within the bosom of the movement. Immediately following the defeat, Lambro wrote that Bush's fate had been sealed two years before: "When Mr. Bush cynically reneged on his no-new-taxes pledge, the linchpin of that Republican coalition, he deeply eroded his conservative political base of support, destroyed his credibility on tax and spending issues, and sent the economy into the tank." In fact, as Abramowitz points out, conservative turnout in 1992 matched its historic rate for presidential election years, and conservatives were half as likely as GOP moderates to defect to Ross Perot. Even Reagan himself, before his deification, endured regular doses of conservative complaint. Conservatives raged when he raised taxes or signed an arms control treaty with the Soviets. (As George Will wrote bitterly of the 1987 nuclear accord, "December 8 will be remembered as the day the Cold War was lost.") In 1984, Policy Review assigned eleven conservatives to write evaluations of Reagan for a special issue, and eight delivered negative assessments. When Reagan's popularity recovered at the end of his second term, he was cleansed of all his ideological sins. This is why, only now--with George W. Bush's popularity mired in a seemingly inescapable pit--are conservatives recalling his apostasies in such vivid detail. The list of grievances, though, has a distinctly musty odor. Here is a typical iteration of the complaint, as voiced by Craig Shirley: "[R]esentment is growing over steel tariffs, prescription-drug benefits, a League of Nations mentality, the growth of government and harebrained spending, the McCain- Feingold campaign finance law, the increasing regulation of political speech in the United States and endemic corruption." Shirley, you can't be serious. One of these complaints--"a League of Nations mentality"--is phantasmal. Another--McCain-Feingold and increasing regulation of political speech--is double-counted. The rest of those items all date back to the first couple of years of the administration, when conservatives celebrated Bush rapturously. Two years ago, he appeared before the American Conservative Union and "basked in a rock star reception and enjoyed several standing ovations," according to one account. The Washington Times compared the reception to that received by Reagan himself and editorialized that it "exposes the danger of conservative abandonment of Mr. Bush as a myth." That fall, National Review heartily endorsed the president, noting, "backing Bush's reelection should be an easy decision." Bush has strongly favored immigration since well before he took office. Republicans have let pork-barrel spending rise almost continuously since they took control of Congress more than a decade ago. Only now, however, have conservatives in Washington staged open revolts over lax border enforcement or bridges to nowhere. The doctrinal deviations that conservatives once accepted with minor grumbling have blossomed into full-scale heresy. The liberal author Rick Pearlstein once said of the right's mindset, "Conservatism never fails. It is only failed." Bush has failed. Therefore, he cannot be a conservative.