governing, Republicant style
The latest Washington Monthly cover story, “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” is a great follow-up to the Lakoff piece on Bush’s incompetence. Alan Wolfe leads with an observation that the Bush administration “if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four.” After comparing the Busheviks to exiled Trotskyites, Wolfe notes [all emphases added] that:
The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush's incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president's principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.[…]
Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government. […] As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster.
Using the examples of FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq, Wolfe observes the GOP’s “ideological hostility toward government” leads inevitably to failure.
Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.
A number of brilliant bons mots sparkle among the paragraphs of Wolfe’s polemic, which is well worth reading in its entirety.