the right-wing man
In the latest issue of TNR, Peter Beinart's editorial "The Right Man" destroys the conventional wisdom (Bartlett, Buckley, Will, Viguerie, and Sullivan) that this administration's failures are due to Bush's personality rather than his conservative ideology. Beinart contrasts Bush with Reagan, noting that:
If conservatives were so angry with Reagan at the time, why do they worship him now? It's simple: Because his policies seemed to work.And that's precisely why they are so scornful of Bush today. Think about it. Bush's second term has actually proved more conservative than his first. Since January 2005, he has nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito, fought to privatize Social Security, and signed the two leanest budgets of his presidency--budgets in which domestic discretionary spending actually drops (when adjusted for inflation). And yet conservatives--who turned out for him in historic numbers just two years ago--now can't stand the guy.
Conservatives aren't turning on Bush because his policies aren't conservative. They are turning on him because his policies, from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, have dramatically failed--and failed policies, by definition, cannot be conservative.
An even better summation of Beinart's argument comes from the pen of Jon Chait a few pages later, in "Rummyache:"
To be a loyal conservative during the last half-dozen years, you had to convince yourself to accept a series of propositions that ran the gamut from somewhat implausible to completely absurd. As those propositions collapse, one by one, conservatives are reacting much the same way as communists did following the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are the frantic efforts to rescue conservative orthodoxy by defining the party's leaders as apostates who deviated from the true faith. And there are the dazed true believers coming to grips with certain realities--Katherine Harris is a not a paragon of wisdom and fair-mindedness, after all; the administration's fiscal policies may not be completely sound; President Bush is not quite the visionary war leader we made him out to be; and so on. Only by revisiting the conservative propaganda in light of history's verdict can we see how delusional the movement had become. [emphasis added]