Because I like to be honest with myself.
And because blind loyalty has never been my thing.
“What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--'At this point the break became final.; That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future….
“One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance….
“Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering….
“Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.”
-Peggy Noonan
Conservatives have spent a lot of breath defending Bush over the past few years; I've been been called racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic, a facist, and everything else in the book just for being pro-Bush. (If you've never heard the story of how Dr. Leap yelled at me for a full ten minutes the day in 2004 that I accidentally showed up on her doorstep as a Buch volunteer...well, it was a character-building experience.)
Bush was a standard for conservatives to rally around. We tend do best with such a standard.
But Bush is not conservatism. As a standard he has turned out to be more a barber pole than a banner.
Don't take this as a blind denunciation of everything the Administration has done. I don't do ANYTHING blindly. I don't do many things anymore without half a shaker of salt and a lot of grey around the edges. There are many Administration policies that I still support. Most frustratingly to me leftist friends, I will never back down on Iraq. Leave aside all your arguments about why we actually entered Iraq. They will matter to history,, but right now - and I will take massive abuse for saying this, I know - right now the reason why we went into Iraq just don't matter. If we walk out now, it will create a power vacuum in Iraq, and if you remember nothing else from high school science it should be that nature abhors a vaccum, and power vaccums in that part of the world are generally filled by fundamentalist governments. Remember Afghanistan? Remember the Taliban? The crazies who, before they harbored Osama bin Laden, were most famous for stoning women to death in crowded soccer stadiums full of cheering men? They came to power as a DIRECT result of America and Russia's joint cut-and-run action at the end of the Cold War. Militants from alll sides fought each other there for ten years, and then we vanished, and the Taliban thrust themselves into power.
But I digress. This wasn't supposed to be a post in defense of Bush's Iraq policy, but I guess it's not a bad idea to demonstrate that I'm not setting him adrift to fend of liberal madness all on his own. I still don't think the Administration is the failure that my friends on the left make it out to be. I still think history will vindicate the Bush Doctrine(s).
This is simply to say, it is time to stop letting George Bush define conservatism. The biggest part of the movemement has always been about populism. How do we get back to that?