IMAGO BUSHIE (via mc):

'Bushism': Win or lose, the president has remade the politics of the right. (JOHN MICKLETHWAIT AND ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE, October 27, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

The past four years have arguably brought more dramatic changes to conservative America than to America as a whole--to the way that it thinks and is organized, and to the ranking of the groups within it. The right has been in the driving seat, but it has not been a comfortable ride. [...]

The massive growth in the state during this presidency (faster than under Bill Clinton, even if you exclude the spending on the war on terror) owes a fair amount to opportunism--to Mr. Bush's willingness to pay off friends in the business world or a refusal to pick a fight with allies in GOP-controlled Congress (he has not wielded his veto pen once). But at its heart it is a deliberate strategy. He came to office planning to expand the Department of Education (an institution the Gingrichistas had planned to abolish). And he laced his acceptance speech at the GOP convention with promises to use government to improve people's lives.

Is this, as many conservatives fear, a move to the left? Mr. Bush was certainly worried by the way that Gingrich Republicanism had apparently alienated suburban Americans. But he is no Nixon, flying in Harvard professors to fine-tune the Great Society. He has had a more ambitious aim: to turn government into an agent of conservative values. Hence the emphasis on choice and accountability to force public-sector bureaucracies to act more like the private sector. And hence the enthusiasm for using government departments to promote conservative values such as sexual abstinence and responsible fatherhood. Before Mr. Bush, conservatives had assumed that the only way to win the battle against what Michael Barone has dubbed "soft America" was to shrink government. Mr. Bush has pioneered a different strategy--to "harden" government itself.

Mr. Bush's position in the culture wars is much easier to categorize than his position on big government: He has shifted power dramatically in favor of social conservatives. Modern American conservatism has been based around a coalition of antigovernment libertarians (many of them based in the West) and social conservatives (many based in the South). Reagan did a virtuoso job of keeping both sides happy, giving the social conservatives just enough to keep them on side, but never so much that he risked alienating the libertarians (who always suspected that a divorced actor was one of them). In his first term, Mr. Bush has tilted in the direction of social conservatives. Wherever you look--stem-cell research, gay marriage, abortion rights or drug policy--he is joined with the religious right. [...]

Which brings us to what is Mr. Bush's boldest contribution to reinventing conservatism--foreign policy. It is easy to find parallels between his foreign policy and Reagan's. The latter married American power and American principle (particularly the onward march of freedom). He believed in calling evil by its proper name. And he endured criticism that he was a naïve Wilsonian rather than a sensible conservative realist. In some ways Mr. Bush's battle against "the axis of evil" is a logical continuation of Reagan's against "the evil empire."

But these continuities should not blind conservatives to the radicalism of America's post-Sept. 11 foreign policy. First, remember that Reagan's foreign policy was, at the time, a radical departure from older conservative traditions such as America-firstism and Kissingerian realism. Then add the fact that the Bush foreign policy has been far more ambitious than Reagan's was. Turning to the neoconservatives, Mr. Bush has applied his doctrine of spreading democracy to an area of the world where the Reaganites feared to tread. Baghdad is not Warsaw; Ayatollah Sistani is not Lech Walesa. Mr. Bush has also taken his ideas much further than Reagan. Within a few months of the declaration of the "Bush doctrine"--those who harbor terrorists will be treated as terrorists--American tanks were rolling into Baghdad.

From Sept. 11 till the Iraq invasion, most conservatives expected that the war on terror would hold their movement together. The "axis of evil" would fit into the slot vacated by "the evil empire." And the conservative foot soldiers would put aside their differences--particularly over government spending--in a common war against Islamist extremism.

There are still times when that theory holds--the GOP convention was a masterly exposition of this unifying credo--but as Iraq gets ever messier, the noises off-stage grow louder. [...]

Yet there is one area where Mr. Bush has exceeded the expectations of everybody on the right--party building. He is arguably the greatest Republican party builder since William McKinley. Presidents always have a temptation to put themselves above their parties. Thus Nixon pursued a policy of "lonely victory" in 1972 and Mr. Clinton "triangulated" between the House conservatives and his own party's liberal wing. Mr. Bush has eschewed this temptation.

He put the full credibility of the post-Sept. 11 White House on the line when he campaigned for his fellow Republicans in 2002--an election that ended with a GOP majority in the Senate. The White House has also paid enormous attention to building an organization to get out the vote, with a captain in every precinct and volunteers in every county. Mr. Bush has done nothing less than reinvent the party machine for the world of far-flung suburbs and exurbs.

Foreign crises come and go--the fundamental reforms of the domestic Welfare State are far more important.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 29, 2004 6:50 AM