The Republican Revolution

Glenn Greenwald has two extensive posts up that reach the heart of the result of 12 years of reflexive politics-as-professional-wrestling. I'm not going to excerpt them, but they are an important read, the thesis of which being that many Bush followers have now defined "liberalism" as saying anything counter to the policies of George W. Bush. It doesn't matter if you have been committed to conservative principles for decades, if you so much as mildly criticize the Bush Administration, you are a hateful liberal and are hereby cast out of the tent of conservatism.

This is not to say that there are no Republicans willing to criticize the Administration. Indeed, those voices are becoming more strident of late. Chuck Hagel has criticized war policy. John McCain has castigated the White House on torture. Several conservatives, from Hagel to Arlen Specter to Mike DeWine to Heather Wilson of New Mexico, are dismayed by the illegal warrantless wiretapping program, as are movement conservatives like Grover Norquist and Bob Barr. It is not that there are no conservatives willing to speak up. It's that they are consistently met with cries of disloyalty. Read this excerpt from a report on Bob Barr's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

Barr answered in the affirmative. "Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?" he posed. "I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes."

But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.

Conservatism is not a jersey you wear to root for your favorite football team (nor is liberalism). It's a coherent ideology rooted in a series of core beliefs. We have gone from the early 1990s, when "conservatism" meant a belief in limited government, a distrust of federal bureacracy, and fiscal discipline in reining in spending, to today, when government spending has exploded, when domestic spying without judicial review is deemed OK, when the expansive powers of a unitary executive are seen as proper. This is completely incoherent.

Bushism has become a cult of personality, where the movement and the man are one. This is extremely dangerous for the country, and is rightly being met with derision and a collapse in support. As Bush fades into irrelevance as his Presidency draws to a close, it will be interesting to see how the rah-rah cheerleaders manage the about-face necessary to return to the conservative fold. As they have no shame, I doubt they'll linger much on how they compromised their principles during the Bush years. They'll simply port their cheerleading over to the next empty suit.

I'd be thrilled to have an honest debate over policy and ideology with true conservatives who stick to their beliefs and are not beset with internal contradictions. Sadly, they're a dying breed. And the cult of Bushism, which casts these true conservatives to the winds and muzzles their dissent, has only accelerated their decline.