The no true Scotsman thing is also, BTW, a red herring. Scotland is a place, and anyone who lives in Scotland is arguably a Scotsman. Plus, other than maybe Burns, there is little history of intellectually-rigorous attempts to refine and define “Scotdom.” Conservatism, on the other hand, is intrinsically about ideas, values, and practices. There is no “Conservatorialand.” “Conservatives” must and only can be defined by ideas and practices (not so “Scotsmen,” who have various non-principle-related things that may tag them as Scottish). Putting salt in porridge and wearing rep ties are not defining characteristics of Scotsmen or conservatives. But believing in conserving fiscal, military, and national-sovereignty resources are defining characteristics of conservatives as the leading definers of such ideals have set them forth over the years. Midgets like Rove or the neocons who seduced GWB are hardly enough to re-define long-established consensus understandings of conservatism, which unlike Scotdom, is idea/behavior based exclusively.
Good, because that’s not remotely what I’m suggesting. To be clear:
- You can identify as conservative without supporting Bush.
- You can support Bush without identifying as a conservative (although I’ve rarely heard it happen).
- “Conservative” is a term defined by use and understanding, not by God Almighty On High nor by long-dead philosophers.
- Under current use and understanding, the vast majority of folks in the US who identify as conservative are Bush-supporters, and the vast majority of folks in the US who support Bush are self-identified conservatives.
- It’s foolish to suggest, therefore, that Bush be excluded from the ranks of conservatives: to do so requires ignoring current usage of the term by tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.
Please remember points 1 and 2. These are key.
Daniel
Huerta, like it or not, there are other definitions of the word now current, including a range of attitudes we probably agree are repugnant. To insist on a definition of “conservative” that is now, bluntly, obsolete puts you on a par with our colleague Liberal, unfortunately. Fortunately for modern liberals, to whom have been attributed many negative things by those same self-styled modern “conservatives”, the word “progressive” is also available to clear up confusion.
So, perhaps the old-style conservative you describe needs a new appellation to rescue it from those who have debased it?
Dude, it’s probably my whole point (and possibly the second time we’ve agreed, probably both on not liking GWB’s policies). I was too distracted last night to post that my original distinction between “conservatism” (which when you look beyond the past eight years, does indeed have a long history and content) and “whatever Rove and GWB say when Karen Hughes or AEI dreams it up” was that this distinction would be a very useful talking point to arguing with (if the OP’s friends meet this description) self-styled, well-meaning, “conservatives” who HAVE drunk the Kool-Aid. All of my talking points for the OP were in the vein of: “You’re a conservative guy. You have a conservative frame of mind, I know it from your personal values of thrift, prudence, diligence, etc. And I know from your support of the military, your admiration for Reagan, etc., you have some respect for the conservative tradition. THIS GUY’S NOT ONE OF YOU. Let me tell you, he’s let down some of the principles that historical conservatives fought 200 years to support. What has he conserved? Is he prudent, like you and your buddies? Does he watch his budget, like you and the wife? Does he avoid starting fights, just because he’s big enough maybe to win them, just like you don’t go looking for trouble? Does he eschew Big Ideas about reshaping the world or human nature, which failed so badly with the Marxists? Then if he doesn’t, no conservative he.” It’s not only historically accurate, it has a chance of getting someone who wants to be “conservative” in a meaningful way wake up to understanding that (because party politics often hijack labels), he’s been kind of manipulated by a transient faction of a political clique, and that if his support of GWB is truly motivated by “conservatism,” well, it shouldn’t be.
Huerta, the history of conservatism includes such gems as defending slavery, opposing women’s sufferage, and supporting segregation. Are you embracing all that?
Now that Bush is out of office and his popularity is in the toilet, it’s disingenous to suddenly start claiming that he’s not a real conservative. It would have meant something if conservatives had spoken out against Bush back in 2000 or 2004. But conservatives were happy to be up riding on the bandwagon then.
Read the title of the OP. Then, read OP. Then, realize that this thread is not about “Conservativism: Yea Or Nay?” or even yet “Conservatives Suck” or “Wherein Huerta88 Justifies Everything People Ever Claimed Was Conservative.”
No – the OP wanted “How Do I Argue With My Self-Styled Righty Friends That Bush Sucks Without Eliciting Knee-Jerk Hostility?” For that reason ONLY I provided the OP with a how-to-attack-Bush-from-the-old-school-Right primer, which might well be more effective with his buddies who are or think of themselves as “conservative” friendly than “Well as we all know GWB is an idiot, so you must admit that . . .” N.B. that we are not debating whether conservatism, however defined, is good, or whether GWB was a good President – we’re giving the OP tools to find an opening with those who (still) seem to think GWB is/was a great conservative President. My tools were on-topic tactics and might or might not work. Your discussion of slavery is decidedly not on topic and has no chance of helping the OP in his discussions with his drinking buddies.
Only because you are (1) hijacking; (2) determined to retain your rhetorical right to use “conservative” solely as an epithet and thus determined to define “conservatism” as 100% coextensive with “everything bad, or everything bad Bush did;” and (3) you are wrong.
For instance, starting in 2002:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=249460&highlight=conservative
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5493735&highlight=conservative#post5493735
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5511705&highlight=conservative#post5511705
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8399451&highlight=conservative#post8399451
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8632419&highlight=conservative#post8632419
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9382614&highlight=conservative#post9382614
This is just from me, with one keyword search. I didn’t bother doing an “Iraq” search but I know I could track down a good number of “reckless invasion is not conservative!” posts by YHOS.
There has been a long-building move toward questioning GWB’s credibility as any kind of meaningful conservative. If anyone is lauding him because of “conservatism,” partaking of my bullet points to the OP and/or my grousing in the above links would, indeed, provide some fodder for putting the OP’s buddies on the defensive as to just what kind of “good conservative” GWB was.
???
Another thread on what conservative means…
You were the one who claimed Bush wasn’t a conservative. I’m sure it would’ve suited your purposes better if nobody else had pointed out how weak that claim was but that’s not the way this board works. You make a point; other people challenge it - that’s not a hijack.
And claiming I use conservative as an epithet is a strawman. There are good conservatives and bad conservatives. There are good conservative ideas and bad conservative ideas. Only a liberal ideologue would insist that every conservative and every conservative idea is bad. And only a conservative ideologue would insist that every conservative and every conservative idea is good.
good, because I never insisted that (or, show me if I did, Mr. fond-of-strawman accusations). I said that Bush is not really even in the conservative orbit, bad or good, as that orbit was understood for many many decades before him, and that this was an effective, potentially, tool for arguing with those who historically had identified with “conservatism.”
As I doubt you are one of those, please either (1) disprove my notion that the OP (remember the God Damned OP?) could use my tactics to attack his buddies from an angle they would not be expecting; or (2) quit your damn hijacking. Whether you agree that Bush “needs” to be identified with “conservatism” or vice versa is really a personal obsession, not anything relevant to how the OP might or might not win an argument with his friends.
Actually, given the very narrow parameters Huerta appears to be making the case in (that is, it’s a rhetorical device intended to distance one self-identified conservative from another), I believe his point is legitimate: while it’s foolish overall to deny that Bush is conservative, it’s sensible to define conservative for the purposes of a particular conversation, and then to examine how well Bush fits that definition.
While I said things about liberal and conservative idealogues, I never accused you of being either.
What relevance do historical standards have in a situation like this? A hundred years ago, conservatives said women shouldn’t get the vote. A hundred years from now, conservatives might agree that dolphins should get the vote. No current conservative agrees with either of those positions. People are best judged by the standards of their own times. And Bush is a conservative according to the standards that existed when he was in office.
Do you really think that the people described in the OP - the ones who were spouting that Obama is a socialist - are going to be swayed by the argument that Bush misinterpreted Hegel and should have focused more on the ideal of statism as emphasized by Gabler and the early works of Leo rather than the revolutionary doctrines espoused by Strauss and Ruge?
Obama is a socialist, in their eyes and in mine, because he’s pushing through a campaign to socialize bank ownership, have the government potentially subsidize home mortgages, prop up, which is not too different from nationalize, formerly-private industries. Which is just when I jump in with those guys in the bar and say – right, BHO is a socialist; now define for me a hairs-breadth worth of difference between what GWB was pushing w.r.t. how to handle the various bailouts on his last day in office, and what BHO said on his first day?
I’m glad you picked that one out – sure, these guys may have been using hyperbole, and no, socialistic policies (and the bailout is socialistic in many of its aspects, again using a historic definition of government intervention in the economy), do not a commie make of BHO, but the government-taking-over-companies-in-a-way-not-seen-since-1917 angle is one on which no GWB supporter should feel at all comfortable, given that he kicked off that particular party (another separate debate is whether there is no variation between the parties on this issue because the circumstances are so unique that anyone would have had to swallow a little nationalization; I don’t believe it, but that’s OT). Again, as tactics, I will talk to GWB supporters until I am blue in the face about the evils of socialism (N.B. on a more abstract level all deficit spending has a socialistic effect as it imposes costs, in tax, inflation, etc. on at least future generations, so again, GWB’s hands are far from clean).
I defy you to refute the statement that George Bush was a conscious agent of the Iranian government. This is not something I truly believe, but Iran was the main beneficiary of almost everything he did. He destroyed their worst enemy and then placed about half of Iraq under their control. He did everything possible to support their development of nuclear weapons. I could go on.
I will leave off what happened to the economy. And through inattention he allowed the 9/11 attack since the surveillance was a Bill Clinton initiative.
There were many other things; the above is just the high spots.
The Bush Presidency is a shining example of what you get if you let ideology triumph over facts, data, and science. They knew what it was that they wanted to do and then distorted the facts to try to justify it rather than using the facts and data to help decide the policy.
What we got was a horrendously bad foreign policy that immeasurably lowered the status of the U.S. in the eyes of most of the rest of the civilized world, a huge debt, an economy that (despite the debt…which ought to have at least provided a decent stimulus) is possibly in the worst shape since the Great Depression, and very little progress on major environmental issues (although with a few bright spots like the marine sanctuary mentioned above).
Try this one on for size:
General Petraeus and company – the military leadership in Iraq who overturned the old Pentagon, Bush-supported strategies to provide the generally successful looking Iraq we have currently – actually hid their new strategies from Bush and the Pentagon for quite a while. Why? Because they knew that Bush and his toadies would never go for the ideas that eventually worked the best (like putting local militants on the payroll).
To add to the list: Bush appointed a horse lawyer (and a disgraced horse lawyer at that) with no emergency management experience to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and publicly announced he was doing a “heckuva job” while people in Louisiana and elsewhere went homeless and hungry.
Bush also attempted to get Harriet Miers, a longtime family friend with no judicial experience, scant litigation experience, and no Constitutional law experience, appointed to the Supreme Court. It’s hard to remember a more glaring case of cronyism.
And that was a major problem. He started out mildly conservative, almost moderate, but he went to the Dark Side and started spending like a wild-eyed liberal.
RINOs are the biggest problems that conservatives have.
Well, seven years later for Tojo, but I take your point; Japan was certainly defeated within four years: Hideki Tojo - Wikipedia
Rumsfeld was a bad SecDef, in love with his own theories to the detriment of mission readiness. And Bush was too loyal to boot him or not savvy enough to see that Rummy would lose the Iraq War.
“Al-Qaeda in Iraq” only existed after de-Baathification. And it was they that turned Iraq into a hellhole. Which is partly due to Rummy’s plans for minimal troop presense in a country we were occupying & refusal to secure the borders.
The invasion itself was rushed, without taking the time to train more Arabic-speaking personnel. De-Baathification created chaos.
And that’s just Iraq.