On the newly-freed NY Times op-ed page, Paul Krugman takes on the myth that George W. Bush has somehow departed from the tenets of movement conservatism.
There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots. Well, I don’t know what true conservatism is, but while doing research for my forthcoming book I spent a lot of time studying the history of the American political movement that calls itself conservatism – and Mr. Bush hasn’t strayed from the path at all. On the contrary, he’s the very model of a modern movement conservative….
People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts – which, for a time, were all too successful – to intimidate the press. But this administration’s media tactics, and to a large extent the people implementing those tactics, come straight out of the Nixon administration. Dick Cheney wanted to search Seymour Hersh’s apartment, not last week, but in 1975. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media adviser.
People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater – who, like Reagan, has been reinvented as an icon of conservative purity but was a much less attractive figure in real life – staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy, and was one of only 22 senators who voted against a motion censuring the demagogue.
Above all, people claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s authoritarianism, its disdain for the rule of law. But a full half-century has passed since The National Review proclaimed that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,” and dismissed as irrelevant objections that might be raised after “consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal” – presumably a reference to the document known as the Constitution of the United States.
Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”
But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.
Read the whole thing — Krugman’s got lots more examples in the column.
In the 2008 election, one will hear about how darned unfair it is to connect Republicans to Bush who won’t even be on the ballot.
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Republican Senators and Congresspersons will collect minor disagreements with a President whose malfeasance (latest story: Blackwater) and mendacity (latest story: legal opinions on torture) they have enabled these many years. Conservative ideologues will claim that Bush was really a liberal President because, well, conservatism is goodness itself and the worst president in U.S. history could not possibly ever be a conservative. Oh no.
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Krugman’s points about the unseemliness of the Reagan Administration are a good reminder that even their secular saint, the one who couldn’t pay attention to details either, resembles Bush a whole lot.
About how it’s time for a change – to return to true conservatism.
In many ways, Bush is an example of what Reagan would have tried to get away with, if he’d had a far-right Republican congress to rubber-stamp what he wanted.
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For instance: Reagan had to walk back his beloved tax cuts twice — in ’83 and ’86 — and then Bush 41 had to do it again, which cost him the election in ’92. Deficits don’t matter? Really?
… to check out Chait’s new book “The Big Con” if you haven’t already.
…a Republican Senate for the first six years of his term. They weren’t all quite as looney as St. Ronald, but he did have a Republican majority. They could have easily stalled legislation, and more easily have sustained a veto. They did neither.
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It was amusing to see the Republican party go from the “deficits matter” mantra of the 1960s to the “deficits don’t matter” of the 1980s. Remember the Ev & Charlie show (Sen. Everett Dirkson, I believe from Illinois, Charles Halleck, a Representative from Indiana) from the 1960s? Their mantra was, a billion here and a billion there and soon you’re talking about real money. And that was when the federal budget was on the order of US$200B, not two trillion US$.
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I don’t do economics (indeed, I deride economics as being ascientific) but Reagan’s “supply side economics” never made any sense to me. It was tantamount to “if we reduce taxes to encourage production(the supply part) they (the potential customers) will buy it.” That appeared to be stupid then, and it still appears to be stupid.
… in the early 90’s some dean of some economics department came out with a new book where he said something like “I’m not sure I trust economics as a science.” Wish I could remember the details.
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I had a philosophy professor who used to separate out economics and psychology from the other scientific fields as ‘sciences of pet theories’.