Before he became president, George Bush was asked by journalist
Tucker Carlson, what activity don’t you excel at? He responded,
“Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or
philosophy or something.” Like his father, Bush suffers from an
unwillingness to engage conservative political philosophy
seriously. While his political attenae is keener than his father’s
and he has more access to common sense than his father on certain
issues, he, too, stumbles on the “vision thing” and struggles to
stake out philosophically rigorous positions. The media are quick
to note Bush’s laziness of thought, but they are reluctant, lest it
screw up their right/left narrative, to note its principal
characteristic: borrowing heavily from liberal rhetoric and
uncritically accepting many foolish assumptions of liberalism.
“Compassionate conservatism,” Bush’s unwarranted nod to the
liberal critique of conservatism as mean, has a great deal of
conventional liberal wisdom, otherwise known as political
correctness, built into it. PC-infected thought has been the
besetting problem of Bush’s presidency: a few commendable
conservative instincts can take it only so far before it runs
aground in the absence of a well-conceived conservative political
philosophy capable of confronting the fallacies underlying
political correctness.
Bush’s Supreme Court judicial nominees are like every other area
of his presidency — a mixed bag. Even if Harriet Miers turns out
to be a principled conservative jurist, it will have happened more
by accident than by design. Bush had signaled last week that his
criterion for his second choice was fundamentally unserious: he
lamely accepted the left’s “diversity” expectation even though this
obviously belied his simultaneous insistence on strict
interpretation of the Constitution. The role is either apolitical
or it isn’t. That Bush succumbed at some level to the left’s baldly
political demand for proportional representation on the court
suggests that he too accepts the Democratic Party’s understanding
of it as a political job.
Bush drifts easily into contradictory positions — conservative
attitudes coexisting unconvincingly with liberal assumptions —
because one of the organizing principles of his presidency has
been: How can we present positions that anticipate, and if
politically possible given our base, incorporate elements of a
likely liberal critique? This inferiority complex about liberalism,
which defined so much of his father’s presidency, has driven much
of his: from education (“standards” and “accountability,”
conservative themes, are coupled in Bush’s mind with a leftist
understanding of the federal government’s role in education) to
taxes (Bush resorted at one point to Keynesian garble to justify
tax cuts that could have been justified on a straightforward
understanding of limited government alone) to the war (as Bush ran
into a buzz saw of unpopular opinion in fashionable circles, he
placed greater and greater emphasis on a Wilsonian justification of
war for “democracy” and “women’s rights”).
The left is so far to the left that Bush, even though he almost
always hovers near the center, and is smart enough never to cross
it clumsily like his father, appears to leftists as “radically
conservative.” Would that it were so. Even in areas where Bush has
stuck his neck out culturally, he doesn’t question the liberal
premises of the debate. During the bogus stem cell debate, for
example, he never said: remind me again why the federal government
is involved in this area? He took a different view of what’s
acceptable research for the federal government to do than the
Democrats but he never questioned that the federal government
should be doing research in that area.
Last week’s utterly gratuitous White House statement condemning
Bill Bennett illustrates how much time it spends on nonsense
designed to impress liberals and how little time it spends on
advancing serious principles. Bush’s instinct for leadership has
been stunted by a now-habitual ideological hesitancy, a complacent
acceptance of preexisting lines of a debate drawn by the left.
Bush can lead, but he too often follows the left’s cue. If the
left talks about affirmative action, he will, in a me-too way, talk
about “affirmative access”; if the left proposes a prescription
drug plan, he will propose one of his own. That he doesn’t dare
pick up his veto pen shows he is even unwilling to lead Republicans
in his own party.
A bold and radical presidency? No, it is looking more and more
like his father’s — leading the world abroad, following liberals
at home.
