Is Conservatism vs. Bushism finally coming to a head? Glen Greenwalds' rising storm

Great Debates
1

As Bush nears the end of his term as President and thus the end of his time as an active force for conservatism, it’s inevitable that there will be some consideration amongst conservatives whether the dogged defense of his policies has helped or hurt their cause (and granted, there is no consensus on what the exact cause is, as with all political philosophies.

A recent post by conservative (but recently turned Bush critic) Glen Greenwald has set the conservative blogosphere ablaze with recrimination, denouncements, and so forth. There’s a lot to digest, so I suggest reading both of the key threads:

Do Bush followers have a political ideology?
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/02/do-bush-followers-have-political.html

Follow up:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/02/follow-up-to-bush-post-yesterday.html

Greenwald makes a lot of pretty important points. He points out that a lot of the conservative blogosphere has become what it decries: as the now defunct site “Spinsanity” chronicled, the rise of emotional codewords over arguments has reached a fever pitch.

Greenwald also searched out and found a fascinating slice of the past: a Free Republic article on Clinton’s use of a secret warrant system called FISA.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a27337612f5.htm

The most amazing comment: “Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face. Why didn’t Wen Ho Lee just “disappear” into one of these Star Chambers, never to return?”

Contrast those responses to the reactions of the Free Republic crowd on Bush’s warrentLESS wiretapping programs.

While certainly one could argue that 9/11 played a part in changing people’s opinions, Greenwald rightly points out that a distrust of government power, even in times of danger, has always been a conservative principle, and it seems more like knee-jerk defense of Bush is as much at the heart of this as any change in opinion. Certianly, there’s been none of the signs of any one rethinking anything that would signify and acknowledged change in opinion. At the very least, you’d think that people that criticized Clinton for doing things far far tamer than Bush has done would, if 9/11 had changed their minds, at least turn around an admit that Clinton had foresight that they lacked. Instead, they seem to blame Clinton for being too timid: forgetting that he was opposed by them and many conservative Congresspeople at the time.

Anyway, Greenwald makes a lot of points more sincerely than I can. He’s in big trouble, because of course liberals are going to unthinkingly seize on his opinions as a celebration of division within the ranks. (I wonder if they’ll give equally due conseridation to his views on government spending, abortion, and so on?) But there’s a lot worth debating here outside that noise chamber: about the future of conservatism after Bush, about how Bush has changed things for the conservative movement, and so on.

2

That is not true. There is more than one kind of “conservative.” Some currents of conservative thought tend towards libertarianism, and some towards authoritarianism.

3

And the most important current – not just in the conservative movement or the Republican Party, but in the American polity and society as a whole – tends toward doing whatever is good for established business interests, and has no other principles of equivalent priority.

4

Don’t forget the right-wing mantra: IOKIYAR

5

As I noted, liberals are going to want to use these arguments as one side against the other. But I’m more interested in thinking about where conservatism will go once Bush is out of the picture, and where its come since he has been in the picture.

6

Aprez-moi, le deluge!

7

Iokiyar???

8

It’s an interesting piece, and it’s clearly making some waves. But, remember:

[ul][li]There are always internal struggles in parties, both between different factions and between the intellectual part of the party and the machine.[/li][li]This sort of thing only matters to the party as a political actor if it hurts them electorally. If the party keeps winning, it doesn’t matter if traditional supporters or intellectual backers desert.[/li][li]Whilst it’s easy to talk of Bush supporters as cultists, it’s a perfectly normal part of political behaviour to find ways of accepting what your guy does. Cognitive dissonance reduction is real and powerful.[/li][li]To someone who struggles to keep a clear and open mind, it’s always a humiliating and disgusting thing to be a supporter of the party in power.[/ul][/li]
So, a lot of this normal.

But if they start to bleed electorally (and it looks, from over here, as though it probably will) and if that’s anticipated, there will be ugliness.

Perhaps, though, the bypassing of ideology - and I’d go say far as say coherence - by most political parties is a bit of a trend. The machines don’t need ideas to stir the populace now.

[on preview: Yllaria, I take IOKIYAR to mean that It’s OK If You Are Republican]

9

It’s OK if you’re a Republican. See also IOKIARDI – It’s OK if a Republican does it.

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[QUOTE=hawthorne]
Perhaps, though, the bypassing of ideology - and I’d go say far as say coherence - by most political parties is a bit of a trend. The machines don’t need ideas to stir the populace now.

[QUOTE]

:confused: Politics in the U.S. right now is more ideological than it has been in a long time.

11

I’m interested in what’s going to happen to liberalism. Since Bush’s 2005 inauguration speech, where he promised to bring to democracy to everywhere, the Republicans have apparently become the official party of idealism. That’s a title the Democrats used to have, and I’m waiting to see if they’re going to try to reclaim it.

My 2 cents.

12

They never lost it, dude. Democrats have always stuck up for the poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised in a way Republicans, obsessed with making the wealthy sightly wealthier and little else, never have. Perhaps you have a problem recognizing idealism when you see it.

13

Maybe that’s true domestically (though it has been a while since Democrats came up with any great new society-changing ideas) but it’s certainly not true on an international scale. As backwards as it sounds, Bush has done more for the poor and disenfranchised of the world than any democrat.

14

I think most of the population of the Third World would disagree. Loudly.

15

Yer gonna have to explain that one.

16

Yes, he’s made more of them.

17

Bush ramped up AIDS spending, (even after that $15 billion got whittled down) and established the office of the global AIDS coordinator. We’ve been (albeit very marginally) more active in Sudan than we were in Rwanda.

You could attribute that all to the fact that aid just increases no matter who’s president. But his Iraq democratic regime change policy shows a real philosophy behind it. We may have killed tens of thousands of people who would otherwise do us no harm, but Saddam killed at least 300,000 and would probably keep doing it if he were still there.

I’ll be the first to tell you that Iraq may not have been the best use of our efforts, in terms of either dollars or lives. One institution that could use a (hopefully bloodless) democratic regime change would be the UN, and there were other more repressive regimes that had less popular support and would have put up less resistance.

Even supposing though that Bush’s philosophy is just a cover for what he would have done anyway, the Democrats haven’t yet offered anything to oppose it. As it is, he’s basically taken a Kennedy-esqe foreign policy notion of promoting democracy and turned it to the Republicans. If Kennedy ran as a Democrat today, I’m not sure the party would take him.

A lot of this Republican idealism does have to do simply with the fact that Bush has more political capital to spend than Democrats do on foreign affairs, and there isn’t much Democrats can do about that for the moment. But many mainstream democrats (i.e. the DLC) have also adopted an inferiority complex and became poll whores, which makes it hard to think much about foreign aid, or any kind of long-term vision.

18

Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush

I believe this previous post about the wise and benevolent Fearless Leader Who Did It All Himseld proves Greenwald’s point - It isn’t politics or party loyalty, it’s personality cult.

19

OK, David, to start with, if you want to talk about Bush doing something “for the poor and disenfranchised of the world,” do not use Iraq as an example. You lose that argument before you begin.

20

Bush did ramp up AIDS spending in Africa, but it’s arguably a case of “pay me now, or pay me later” as the AIDS epidemic there is horrific and was on its way to becoming totally unmanageable. Any Prez might have done this, but it is vaguely amazing that Bush paid attention to reality here when he’s been so unable to see “pay me now or pay me later” issues wrt, say, the US economy.

Our record in Darfur is not anything to brag about.

Yeah, but we killed 200,000 Iraqis in just a couple of years. This does not constitute an “improvement.” Now the Iraqis have widespread lawlessness, an insurgency led by fanatical Islamists and old Ba’athists, less working infrastructure than thee was before … oy, yeah, we’ve been GOOOOOOD for Iraq, alrighty.

Just “not invading countries for no good reason” puts Dem foreign policy WAAAAAAAAY ahead of Republican foreign policy.