Bush’s Real Principle: Suicidal Liberalism

More than anything else, Bush’s legacy will be the undoing of conservatism within the Republican Party. Prior to his arrival, the rhetoric of Republicans on issues of race and culture and foreign policy was self-confident, less apologetic, more realisitc, more varied, and less tied to the categories of liberalism. But this would be divisive, and Bush hates controversy. Anything divisive, particularly on culture, makes him uncomfortable. He does not discuss immigration, gay marriage, abortion, or any other “fault line” issues in the culture wars. Bush is willing to court controversy and divide his own coalition only for two reasons: the supposed high principle of liberalism and the low practice of cronyism.

In his latest, Bush has threatened to veto efforts by congressional Republicans to block the unseemly take-over of various US ports’ operations by a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates. For Bush to acknowledge the risks of such a foreign presence would contradict the universalist principles undergirding his domestic and foreign policy agendas. In this way of thinking, people are interchangeable, culture does not matter, and all people everywhere want to become a bland, consumerist facsimile of America. This view focuses excessively on the structures of government and law; you give people proper institutions and let the invisible hand of democratic capitalism work its magic. When particular peoples’ inherited culture proves an obstacle–in Iraq or Latin America, for example–this only shows that we need more democracy and more liberalism. This is one reason Bush could care less if the entire Third World moves to America; in his mind, so long as we’re democratic and capitalist any changes they bring are superficial and not matters of principle. And this is also the chief reason he has such a huge blind spot for the limits of democracy as a solution to the illiberal and pathological cultures of the Middle East.

Bush has not vetoed a bill in five years. Not one. But he’s had massive political fights only three times, and two of those fights were primarily with conservatives. One, the Iraq War. Two, the Harriett Miers nomination, where he also accused his supporters of discrimination. And three, his defense of the rights of some UAE company, a fight in which he implicitly calls his critics racist.

The Bush Presidency, while supported at first by conservatives, has led to the subversion of conservatism as a political force. While much of Bush’s policy has been liberal and universalist, its failures, unfortunately, will be blamed on the conservatism that he supposedly represents. Conservatives for a long time defended Bush from criticism and stuck with him out of a combination of loyalty, habit, and the absence of viable alternatives. But it’s become clear that for Bush conservatism is not about conserving anything tangible and historical. It is, instead, about the march of abstractions: Free Markets, Democracy, Color Blindness, Tolerance. America is redefined as a few slogans. When conservatives dare to intervene—noting that people are not all the same, are not equally trustworthy, that generalizations are sometimes called for, and that Arabs and Muslims are the demographic source of most of the terror threat we face—Bush closes his ears and questions their good faith. In this case, the color-blind policy might endanger actual Americans whom Bush is charged to protect. But this is all no matter to Bush.

Under Bush’s grandiose philosophy, his role is not to advance the parochial and particular good of America, even when their interest is as basic as self-defence. It’s instead to suport the triumph of these universal values. We all are being asked to take one for the team. And the team is not our country. The team is the whole human race, which would supposedy recoil in horror if we behaved like a normal, preliberal society. Why else have we not done more to deport illegals after 9/11? Why else hasn’t Bush spoken out forcefully about the Muslim overraction to a few cartoons in an obscure Danish paper? Why else do people in other nations (such as Nigerian Christians) react so differently and more predictably compared to westeners when they’re harassed by Muslim minorities?

For Bush, America is the creedal nation. And the creed supercedes the objective interests of that nation in things like national security, job security, stable ethnic relations, and the dominance of the English langage and our historical Christian culture. Like so much else in liberalism, our objective decline and endangerment is justified as the supposed march of universal justice. Our meek defenses are recast as offensive “attacks.” This is why James Burnham called liberalism an “ideology of western suicide.” It functions to redefine our destruction as a good thing that we should welcome.