{"id":418,"date":"2008-03-20T09:16:33","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T13:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/?p=418"},"modified":"2008-03-20T09:16:33","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T13:16:33","slug":"bushs-betrayal-of-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/bushs-betrayal-of-conservatism","title":{"rendered":"Bush’s betrayal of conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. In the current issue of The American Conservative he gives an assessment of the Bush Administration<\/a> that I am warming to:<\/p>\n

In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush\u2019s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans \u201csafe,\u201d he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles.<\/p>\n

As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.<\/p>\n

Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation\u2019s cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP\u2019s cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is President Bush\u2019s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9\/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.<\/p>\n

. . . .\u00a0. . . .<\/p>\n

Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a na\u00eff would believe that today\u2019s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe<\/em> v. Wade<\/em> or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of \u201cfamily values.\u201d GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party\u2019s professed devotion to the \u201cworking poor\u201d: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

HT: Rod Dreher<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. In the current issue of The American Conservative he gives an assessment of the Bush Administration that I am warming to: In 2001, President Bush took command … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}