The American Conservative Mind And the Failure of George W. Bush

By Jeffrey Hart | Thursday, January 25, 2007

Editor’s Note: The following is the excerpted from the preface of The Making of the American Conservative Mind, by professor emeritus Jeffrey Hart. The book details the American conservative movement from Eisenhower to the present time through the eyes of National Review, where Hart is a senior editor. The book is available at most book stores in both hardback and paperback from ISI publishing.

In The Making of the American Conservative Mind, my method is to use the work of our best historians to establish the facts about successive administrations beginning with Eisenhower, and then to give an account of what National Review had to say when the history was happening. I hope that what the historians have discovered will be as interesting to readers as it was to me. Sometimes, a great disconnect appears between what seemed to be true about public figures and what actually was true. Thus, Princeton historian Fred I. Greenstein in The Hidden Hand Presidency showed that Eisenhower was not really who we had thought, the genial, avuncular “Ike” with the lopsided American grin and jumbled syntax. Rather, he was ruthless, lucid, a fine administrator, and completely realistic. “Ike” was a deliberately achieved persona, a mask. Stephen Ambrose, in Eisenhower the President, confirmed this portrait and added to it. In 1960, everyone thought Jack Kennedy was young, vigorous, and athletic. In An Unfinished Life, Robert Dalleck, the first historian to see Kennedy’s complete medical records, showed that he suffered from multiple disabling ailments and was the sickest man ever to be elected president. In January 1969, when he came to the presidency, Richard Nixon knew the Vietnam war could not be won. His job, as he saw it, was to get America out; he also knew he could not admit this publicly.

Based on the evidence, Eisenhower and Reagan emerge as the great presidents of the postwar period. They both confronted and dealt successfully with the problems they faced, both were prudent realists, and both were reelected by landslides. Franklin Roosevelt joins them as the third great president of the twentieth century, a man who was successful in peace and world war and was elected four times.

The Making of the American Conservative Mind ends with the narrow reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, and the final chapter discusses twelve items in the constellation of ideas that in combinations constitute the American conservative mind. I deliberately use the word “combinations” in its plural form because the relative importance of the ideas can change with time. These ideas are not to be applied mechanically but with tact. Thus, free-market economics is valid, but it must be modified by what Burke called “the unbought grace of life,” that is, by other values of civilization. Not everything is for sale.

Measured against those twelve ideas, George W. Bush—as everyone saw when this book first appeared—did not score well, though National Review has continued to admire him, Richard Lowry even characterizing him as “neo-Reagan,” despite the manifest success of the Reagan presidency and a gathering consensus among historians that Reagan was indeed a great president, while it seems clear that George W. Bush is in various kinds of serious trouble. Nevertheless, I have heard at National Review the thought that Bush is “even better than Reagan,” and one writer for the magazine has even compared Bush to Lincoln.

* * * * *

Now, in the early summer of 2006, it is time for another provisional assessment of the Bush administration from a conservative perspective, with an account of National Review’s ongoing response to the central issues of this presidency. It must be provisional because we lack access to archival material, oral histories, and other evidence that eventually will be available to historians, and so we necessarily depend on journalists of various kinds and books as they come off the presses. Still, a great deal is emerging and judgments are forming, as Bush’s approval rating hovers around 30 percent—a lot better even there than Dick Cheney’s, which as I write stands at about 18 percent.

In the June 5, 2006 National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru published an article wondering why, with the economy relatively strong, Bush’s approval rating remained so low. In answering Pommuru’s question I am tempted to echo Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet and say “Let me count the ways,” that is, the ways in which Bush has sunk so low in the nation’s estimation. I can think of nine major reasons:

The Iraq War
The response to Hurricane Katrina
Bush’s proposal to privatize Social Security
The Terri Schiavo case
Embryonic stem-cell research
The Bush administration’s contempt for, perhaps ignorance of, science
The administration’s overall fiscal mismanagement
The Jack Abramoff scandal and the corruption it revealed
The indictment of I. Lewis Libby in the Joseph Wilson case, and what the indictment of the vice president’s chief of staff implies for the claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

The Iraq invasion looms as the largest factor, since it is often said to be the centerpiece of Bush’s presidency. George W. Bush bet his reputation and historical standing on the Iraq gamble. In this outline it will be taken up last. There are many other important reasons for Bush’s slide into disfavor.

The response of the Bush administration to the damage done by Hurricane Katrina indicated to many that the administration did not know how to administrate, and persuaded people that the federal government could not evacuate even a medium-sized city if required to do so by a terrorist attack. Michael Brown, direction of FEMA, had no relevant experience for his post, though Bush absurdly said he’d “done a heck of a job.” Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court reinforced the impression that qualifications—and competence—counted little for Bush. Following Katrina, Bush’s approval rating dropped to 2 percent among American blacks. Jefferson Davis might have scored higher.

Soon after his narrow reelection in 2004, Bush invested what he called his “political capital” in a radical idea. He proposed to privatize Social Security, one of the most successful New Deal Programs. Instead of direct payments, people would establish personal accounts and invest in the stock market. White House polls indicated that at first this sounded like an appealing idea; but soon it dropped like a stone, since it seemed to make the social safety net depend on the value of Enron or Worldcom stock. The Bush plan looked less and less attractive the more people thought about it.

National Review said editorially that it admired Bush for his “heavy lifting” on Social Security and Iraq. Social Security proved too heavy for Bush to lift, and the same looks true of Iraq.

* * * * *

The Terri Schiavo case was particularly important, certainly for the individuals involved, but also for what it revealed: the poisonous effect the radical Christian right has had on the Bush administration, and through it on the entire nation. As National Review editor Richard Lowry correctly said in his syndicated column of February 23, 2004, evangelical Christians continue to form the indispensable political base of the Bush administration. But their passionate dogmatism overwhelms common sense and their policy preferences turn out to be rejected by the majority of Americans. Often such policy preferences have nothing to do with scripture or the teachings of Jesus, even though “faith” energizes the politics of the Christian right. Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan coined the term “Christianist” to describe this politics, seeing it as related to Christianity in the same way that Islamist ideology is to the religion of Islam. On one occasion Bush provided educational leadership by declaring that Intelligent Design should be taught “along with” evolution in biology classes.

This Christian right base was fully mobilized in a well-financed effort to “save Terri,” who had long been in a permanently vegetative coma. The Bush administration spearheaded the effort to prevent the removal of her feeding tube, which had sustained her for eight years. This proved to be a public opinion disaster. On whether the feeding tube should be removed, the American people said yes by almost a two-to-one majority (a Fox News Channel poll showed that 61% of respondents favored removal of the tube, while a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll put the same number at 80%; other polls fell somewhere in between).

No doubt existed regarding Terri’s condition. On the early morning of February 25, 1990, Terri collapsed in her apartment. Her husband Michael Schiavo called 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, her heart had stopped beating for several minutes, depriving her brain of oxygen. There was no doubt about the result. Neurological tests and CT scans showed that her cerebral cortex had become liquid spinal fluid. Cognition was completely impossible. Any physical movement by Terri was stimulated by her autonomic nervous system, her brain stem. Existing in an irreversible vegetative state, she was kept alive by the feeding tube that sent nutrients directly to her digestive system and was incontinent. (Her eventual autopsy showed that her brain was half its normal size.)

Fast-forward fifteen years, and after an astonishing sequence of events, lasting until March 31, 2005, the feeding tube was finally removed and Terri died. The events are difficult to summarize briefly. Suffice to say, by the end, Congress had passed legislation designed to “save Terri,” and President Bush had flown on Air Force One to Washington from Crawford, Texas, to sign the bill, conspicuously hoping to save precious time.

In Washington during this feverish period, politicians said strange things. According to majority whip Tom DeLay, “Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead. She talks, she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort.” Senate majority leader Bill Frist, heretofore a respected physician, gave everyone a reason to question his integrity. Without examining Terri and basing his opinion on a highly edited videotape, he said Terri’s diagnosis might be wrong. This was irresponsible. Editorially, National Review expressed the opinion that Terri might be capable of some cognition, apparently unaware of the evidence available to the contrary about her cerebral cortex. On March 31, 2005, the feeding tube was removed and Terri died painlessly, completely unaware. President Bush said that “we need judges who understand that our rights derive from God,” thus offering a religious condemnation of judges who had upheld the Constitution and the independence of the judiciary from the legislative branch. The legal right of Michael Schiavo to speak for Terri as determined by the courts apparently did not occur to Bush. He had rewarded his indispensable base but lost the confidence of the majority of Americans.

Another absurd position taken by the Bush administration concerns the therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells, an issue that has simmered since the president for all practical purposes blocked federal funding for such research in August 2001. Again, a large majority of the public supports the research, and it was a marginal issue in the 2004 elections when a California initiative authorized $30 billion for it. Embryonic stem cells hold out the promise of curing devastating diseases. Bush frames his opposition this way: “It is wrong to destroy life in order to save life.” In that sentence, his first use of the word “life” refers to an almost microscopic clump of fertilized cells, most of them now frozen in fertility clinics and doomed anyway. His second use of “life” refers to anyone from a baby with deadly Type I diabetes to an adult with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or countless other diseases. National Review agrees with Bush. Editorially, the magazine has said that a fertilized cell “must not be destroyed no matter how noble the cause.” That absolutist prohibition does not survive a moment’s reflection. I believe that Dartmouth Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry Lee A. Witters demonstrates genuine moral imagination when he puts it this way: “If you had a child with Type I diabetes [life threatening], and I told you that I had a few cells that would cure her, would you turn this down?” Almost everyone would say no. Bush’s position is nonsense, and most people know it. For all practical purposes, the argument about embryonic stem cells is over.

* * * * *

Bush inherited a budgetary surplus from Clinton and his treasury secretaries Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin. By spending massively and at the same time cutting taxes, Bush has run up federal indebtedness to unprecedented heights, the debt financed mostly by China. In 2005, Reagan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett published Impostor, a comprehensive criticism of Bush’s budgetary policies. As he wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed column (March 12, 2006):

“As a lifelong conservative, I have to be honest: George W. Bush is not one of us and never has been. There can be no denying that he has enacted polices contrary to conservative principles on too many occasions. In my view, his greatest failing has been a total lack of control over federal spending—to the point where liberal Democrat Bill Clinton is looking more and more like the ‘good old days.’”

Bartlett believes that Bush’s successor is going to have to enact large tax increases to clean up the mess Bush will leave behind. It is not the only mess Bush’s successor will have to deal with. For Bush decided to go to war with Iraq soon after he came to office in early 2001, long before 9/11. Two reasons were given: 1) the threat to the United States posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, and nuclear; and 2) the idea of spreading democracy through the Middle East, on the view that democracies do not start wars. The threat of weapons of mass destruction sold the American people on the war. As it turned out, Iraq had none at all. There are now serious reasons to believe that the claims about WMD by the Bush administration had a very weak basis. Intelligence expert Thomas Powers has used the word “fabricated” about some of the administration’s claims. A particularly effective case has been made in support of that charge by the report of the minority staff of the House Judiciary Committee. Titled The Constitution in Crisis, it is readily available online. Bush’s defenders shy away from the evidence here, evidently for partisan reasons. Historian Robert Dallek has called this report “devastating.” I have compiled a bibliography of recent work tending to support the “devastating” claims of the report.

Chapter 25 of The Making of the American Conservative Mind includes an important statement by Bush outlining his theoretical basis for attempting to spread democracy in the Middle East, first by achieving it in Iraq. Speaking before the American Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003, Bush put forth the following theory of human behavior:

“Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.”

Much of this is refuted by history and individual experience. The people going to work in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11 did not want the same things as Mohammed Atta. Holiness, conquest, and national glory—just to name a few things—may have greater appeal than freedom and democracy. But Bush’s belief in the convergence of human interests and the superficiality of conflicting goals is apparently unshakable. On April 24, 2006, he repeated this theory in a speech delivered in Irvine, California:

“I based a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there’s an Almighty, and secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free. I believe liberty is universal. I believe people want to be free. And I know that the best way to defeat the enemy, the best way to defeat their ability to exploit hopelessness and despair, is the ability to give people a chance to live in a free society.”

Free societies are a relatively new thing in human history, and are still far from the norm in this world. The work of the Almighty has certainly taken its time in being accomplished. Dick Cheney differed sharply with Bush’s theory about the harmony of human goals:

“Once you get into Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you put in place of the one that’s there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward Islamic fundamentalism? How much credibility is that going to have is it’s set up by the American military there? How long does the American military have to stay there to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens when we leave?”

But Cheney said that in 1991 when he was secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush.

The Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq was meant to overthrow Saddam and establish a beacon of democracy and freedom that would inspire the Islamic world. Speaking at Whitehall in 2003, Bush said: “The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global expansion of democracy . . . as the alternative to instability and hatred and terror.” Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, a conservative strategic thinker, has marveled at Bush’s “[f]usion of breathtaking utopianism with hardly disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration of Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshall von Moltke.”

From the beginning National Review supported the invasion of Iraq as part of the renovation of the Middle East and, while admitting difficulties and setbacks, ran articles supporting the war with cover headlines such as “Arab Spring” (March 28, 2005) and “We’re Winning” (May 9, 2005). Meanwhile, other conservatives saw it differently. National Review’s founder William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in a syndicated column that “the American war in Iraq has failed,” and conservative writers from George Will to Andrew Sullivan to Francis Fukuyama have all agreed.

The future is always open. We do not know what kind of Iraq will emerge under its Shiite majority. But we do know that the war will have cost at least $500 billion and will have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans. By the early summer of 2006 a substantial majority of Americans thought the Iraq war a mistake. Will conservatism—and National Review—go down with the ship? That future, too, is open.

The American Conservative Mind And the Failure of George W. Bush

Article Tools

Related Articles