AFTER THE BLUES, BUSH:

The party Bush once commanded is repudiating much of his legacy. And it's doing so because it no longer shares his temperament. Bush was, at his core, an optimist. For starters, he was an optimist about the budget. He had taken over in the wake of a late-1990s economic boom that erased the deficits built up during the Reagan years. For Bush, the message was that you can cut taxes, maintain popular domestic programs, and dramatically boost military spending without worry, because economic growth will eventually balance the budget, as it did in the 1990s. As Dick Cheney famously replied when then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill warned that Bush's economic policies were leading the country toward a fiscal abyss, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

Bush was a cultural optimist, too. He had taken power on the heels of what Samuel Huntington called the "third wave" of democratization, a mighty tide that began when Spain and Portugal shrugged off their autocratic governments in the mid-1970s, and extended in the 1980s and 1990s from South Korea and the Philippines to Argentina and Chile to Hungary and Poland to South Africa. This historic shift--which made democracy the normative form of government not merely in Northern Europe and North America but throughout the world--shaped "neoconservative" intellectuals like William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and Robert Kagan. But it also dovetailed with something personal in Bush. As his former speechwriter Michael Gerson has noted, Bush's brand of Christianity was strikingly untroubled by original sin. His own life was a tale of purposeless, self-destructive wandering followed by radical transformation via the power of faith. And while other conservatives focused on an entrenched "culture of poverty" that made it difficult to change the lives of America's urban poor, Bush championed the idea that with religious counseling, inmates in Texas jails could experience the same radical, redemptive change he'd seen in his own life.

Bush, in other words, was an optimist even when it came to cultures--like the ones prevailing in America's inner cities or in the Arab world--for which other conservatives held out little hope. Despite the incredulity of many on the right, he responded to 9/11 by insisting that Muslims were just as desirous of democracy, liberty, and peace as Christians and Jews. And he set about proving that in Iraq. "The human heart," he told the American Enterprise Institute two months before the invasion, "desires the same good things, everywhere on earth." That universalism also shaped his views on immigration. If Iraqis shared the same basic values as Americans, so did undocumented Mexican immigrants.

The party Bush once commanded is repudiating much of his legacy. And it's doing so because it no longer shares his temperament.

Even during Bush's presidency, his economic and cultural optimism met resistance inside the GOP. From the moment 9/11 hit, polls found that many conservatives--contra Bush--did consider Islam a violent religion. In 2003 the White House and GOP leaders had to brutally pressure some congressional Republicans to make them back Bush's expansion of Medicare. And in 2007 Bush's push for comprehensive immigration reform failed in large part because of lack of conservative support.

But since Bush left office, the GOP pessimists have taken full control of the party. 

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