Analysis  

A Liberal in Conservative Clothing

by Stephen Cox

George W. Bush is a modern liberal. So why do so many liberals hate him?

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A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend, the kind of political conversation that I have often enjoyed during the past three years. My friend, an intelligent modern liberal, listed a number of things that he dislikes about George Bush and his policies and actions, some of which I also dislike. Then he said, "But the worst thing about him and those other Republicans is the way they try to silence their critics."

"Silence them?" I asked. "How do they do that?"

"Come on, now. You know."

"No, I don't. And if that's what they try to do, it doesn't seem to be working. Give me the name of one critic who's been silenced by the Bush regime."

(Silence.)

"Well," I continued, with a gloating smile. "I guess that ends the argument."

But as a famous person once said, just because you've silenced your opponent doesn't mean you've converted him, whether the silencing was accomplished by means of persecution, as my friend suggested, or by means of Socratic dialogue. And his silence was brief. His critique of the president had been conducted in loud and embittered turns, but his next remark was delivered with calm assurance: "Whatever you say, you'll never convince me to become a Republican."

"That's fine with me," I said. "I'm just trying to keep you from remaining a Democrat."

After that point, the conversation was hard to sustain. He was puzzled, I think, by the idea that the Democratic Party may not be the only port of refuge from the hurricane of "right-wing extremism" now ravaging the globe. And he refused to consider the possibility that the weather reports may be wrong, or that Hurricane George may not be a "right-wing" or "fundamentalist" storm. My friend's views seemed so strange to me that I had to remind myself of how common they are, that one of the most remarkable things about our conversation was how unremarkable it was, from a purely statistical point of view.

Dialogues like ours happen wherever the 30 percent of the American population that hates and despises President Bush articulates its views. And because this particular 30 percent includes the vast majority of the nation's molders of opinion, the teachers, ministers, bureaucrats, and other members of the Brainworkers Union, the dialogue renews itself constantly. That's a lot of air time for an argument that is literally preposterous, as preposterous as an argument about whether Babe Ruth was a good basketball player.

The plain truth is that President Bush is in no meaningful sense a right-winger or even a conservative, and he is as far from fundamentalism as the man in the moon. To put this in another way, the man in the moon may be a fundamentalist, but he never seems to act like one, and neither does George Bush. There's an old saying that Christian revivalists use on their audiences: "If Christianity were made illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?" If either fundamentalism or conservatism were made illegal, no one could possibly convict George Bush.

American conservatives ordinarily ally themselves with libertarians in attempting to reduce the size and cost of government. Under the Bush regime, however, federal spending has ballooned and federal influence on the daily lives of Americans has in no way abated. I can think of no federal program that Bush has eliminated or significantly reduced. Quite the contrary.

He has rewarded the egregious failures of American education with an increase in subsidies to the education industry (also an increase in federal meddling). He has rewarded the egregious failures of the space program by offering NASA a new and even more ridiculous manned space program. His new prescription drug program for old people — the vast majority of whom can well afford to pay for their drugs themselves, or pay for them by relying on private insurance — represents an enormous expansion of the welfare philosophy, and yet another enormous unfunded welfare entitlement. After three years as a Republican president, Bush has made no serious effort to liberate the federal budget, or the budgets of individual Americans, from the stranglehold of Social Security. And as for his interest in inspiring habits of budgetary restraint in the Republican Congress . . . When budget bills start omitting funds to build rain forests in Iowa, I will believe that a serious moral commitment has been made to conservative values.

Bush had shown a token commitment to conservative principles in his nominations of candidates for judicial office, some of whom have been supporters of strict construction and limited government. Yet he has ignominiously failed to insist that the Senate — a Senate controlled by the party he heads — actually vote on his controversial appointments. His forces were dispersed by the mere threat of a protracted filibuster, despite the fact that their opponents would have been forced to filibuster against black, Hispanic, and female candidates, and would in all probability have made themselves look like racists and jackasses to boot.

Bush has, of course, pursued an activist foreign and military policy, to the disgust and dismay of traditional conservatives who believe that America should mind its own business and refrain from Wilsonian projects to reform the world. His foreign policy has been a more focused and effective version of the policy pursued by the Clinton administration. Clinton fecklessly meddled with Haiti; Bush effectively meddled with Liberia. Clinton conquered the rebel Slavs; Bush conquered the fractious Afghans and Iraqis. The objective of Bush, as of Clinton, has been humanitarian uplift as well as world stability, and he has gone Clinton one better by launching a messianic attempt to end AIDS in Africa.

What Bush has not gone out of his way to do is to champion such popular conservative causes as opposition to abortion and gay marriage. He has actually done nothing in that regard, nothing beside refusing to sanction foreign aid for population-control programs that involve abortion. Yes, he has announced his opposition to abortion, and he has remarked that marriage should be between a man and a woman, but this is no more than modern liberal politicians ordinarily do, except when they are trying to distinguish themselves from Bush.

The offenses to civil liberties against which liberals ceaselessly inveigh have not exactly amounted to a conservative reign of terror. They have been very few and, with a couple of exceptions, such as the Attorney General's futile obsession with Internet pornography and the nation's futile obsession with drugs, they have involved only the rights, real or imagined, of foreigners, especially foreigners (such as the hapless but wicked Gitmo prisoners) who never succeeded in reaching U.S. soil. Would Clinton have acted any differently? Why would you think he would have? Meanwhile, the administration's respect for liberty, equality, and fraternity has produced the monumental snafu of America's security campaign, which treats little old African American ladies as if they were just as likely as Koran-carrying young Saudi Arabians to hijack a plane and steer for the nearest Wal-Mart.

Bush's attitude toward conservative and nationalist concerns is well illustrated by his new proposals on illegal immigration, which amount to nothing more than a sneaky way of treating it as if it were legal, giving the illegal immigrant a wink and a nod and the implied promise of a Social Security check if they manage to keep a job. Bush apparently contemplates no reform of the Agency Formerly Known as the I.N.S. — a bureaucracy that lets millions of illegal immigrants cross the border and does virtually nothing to deport even those who are caught in subsequent law violations, while turning the lives of millions of legal immigrants into a nightmare of rules, forms, appointments, investigations, and legal fees. As for federal aid to states that are obligated by federal law to provide for the education and health care of illegal immigrants and their families — states such as California, where the annual cost amounts to billions — Bush clearly regards this as the one form of welfare in which the federal government should not engage.

There may be a label for such policies, but I doubt that it's "conservative." I'm sure that it's not "libertarian," either. The closest label would be "modern liberal." Suppose you saw a list of the significant actions of the Bush regime. Is there anything on the list about which you would say, with deep assurance, "Clinton would never have done that"? Please don't say that Clinton would never have promoted a tax cut. Had he been faced with an economic recession, he would probably have done exactly what Bush did — manipulate the economy with tax cuts and Keynesian deficit spending.

I have probably said enough to indicate that Bush is not, in the political sense, either a conservative or a fundamentalist. After all, it's not just fundamentalists who harbor a theoretical antipathy against abortion and gay marriage, and there is nothing whatever, except that antipathy, that might connect Bush with political fundamentalism. But something more can be said about what fundamentalism really is. It's not "right-wing Christianity," as if you could just take a right-wing politician, cross him with a Christian of some sort, and produce the hybrid you have in mind. Fundamentalism is a particular kind of Christianity, not to be confused even with the overlapping category of evangelicalism.

Fundamentalists don't simply preach the gospel as God's word; they emphasize such "fundamentals" as the total "inerrancy" of the Bible. In moral teaching and political action, however, they vary almost as greatly as devout persons' interpretations of the Bible. Some are opposed to all use of alcohol; other believe that such opposition is a "legalistic" affront to Christianity. Some eschew all political action; many (such as fundamentalists in African American churches, of whom there are very, very many) work within the Democratic Party; others are Republicans or even libertarians. But one thing is clear: you'd have to know a lot more theology than President Bush has ever shown signs of knowing in order to be convicted of fundamentalism. Being a reformed alcoholic, going to the Methodist church (one of America's mainstream-to-liberal denominations), and quoting from the Bible on public occasions is very far from enough to make one even a conservative or evangelical Christian, let alone a fundamentalist. Given Clinton's public pronouncements, which are full of references to the Bible and church and his religious experience, one would sooner think of him as a fundamentalist than one would think of Bush as such — if "fundamentalist" were a category that really had analytical relevance to him, to begin with.

Bush's religious and social profile is, in fact, precisely the kind that ordinarily appeals to Democratic voters. He's an honest and somewhat endearingly reformed drunk. He's religious, but he's not a religious bigot or "triumphalist"; he speaks constantly about the value of faiths other than his own. He uses a colloquially fallible English, and he speaks fairly well when he's using it. He places minority and women colleagues in the most important positions in his administration; he provides the kind of governmental "solutions" for which he thinks public opinion clamors; and he refuses to push political quarrels to uncomfortable extremes. Instead, he compromises, compromises, compromises. This is not conservatism, but it could easily pass for modern liberalism.

Why, then, do modern liberals hate him and want to believe that he stands at the farthest political extreme from themselves? There are several reasons, and I suspect that the main one is simply this: they feel entitled to govern, and he is preventing them from doing so.

All the other reasons — he comes from Texas, he is a poor formal speaker, he has rich people in his administration, he stole the presidency in a giant voting fraud — are so flimsy that no one could be impelled by them, in the absence of some other motive. No one, at least, who comes from a Democratic background. Clinton came from Arkansas, he was an embarrassing public speaker (not halting, but something worse — slick and notoriously mendacious), and his government was filled with wealthy (and often corrupt) friends. To believe that Bush stole the presidency, you must, logically, assume that federal courts should refuse to intervene when state law is violated in order to advantage one group of voters at the expense of others — for that is what Florida officials were doing in 2000, before the Supreme Court halted them. No modern liberal can adopt that assumption, without abandoning support for an activist judiciary, which is a hallmark of modern liberalism. Of course, you can refuse to understand that, but to be willingly blind to such an obvious fact means that you are already overwhelmed with emotion. No, modern liberals hate Bush for the same reason they hated Reagan: he turned them out of office.

It is probable that modern liberals hate Bush even more than they hated Reagan. I recall many sneering references to Reagan from my liberal friends, and many ominous forebodings about his upcoming destruction of the world. (The great foreign-policy issue of Reagan's time was his rearming of America and Europe, so as to threaten the Soviet Union; his program produced an immense outpouring of liberal bile.) But the reaction to Bush is different. Mention Bush to one of the modern liberal 30 percent, and you are guaranteed to witness an explosion of hatred. It is this kind of hatred that appears everywhere in the remarks of the current Democratic presidential candidates, because it is the one thing that seems to bring out their sparse but committed audience.

Here hatred and frustration combine. Whatever the candidates may say about the extremism of Bush, their attempts to find issues on which they can attack him necessarily acquaint them with the fact that they have essentially the same political orientation that he has. It must be frustrating, fighting your own mirror image, no matter how distorted you think it is. It must be doubly frustrating for such people as Joseph Lieberman, who find themselves driven further and further to the left, in an attempt to sidle away from that damning reflection.

The Democrats' attempt to place themselves at an enormous distance from Bush is perhaps the worst result of his failure to live up to his label as a conservative. The farther the Democratic Party lurches to the left, the less choice thinking people have about whether to turn out and vote for Bush. If you value your life, do you prefer Bush's moronic but limited "reforms" of health care, or the Democratic candidates' wacky and unlimited schemes? I repeat: if you value your life.

Much the same might be said about the Democrats' plans: to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, but only under the direction of the U.N. and France; to reduce military expenditures, but to spend still more on (the destruction of) education and social welfare; or to manipulate the economy, but to do it on a more massive scale than Bush ever dreamed of. Do I intend to vote for Bush in 2004? Sure I do. But if you gave me a decent alternative, I'd look into it. And should Bush ever ask for my opinion, I will tell him: You can make yourself even more certainly electable if you stop taking thoughtful conservative (or in my case, libertarian) voters for granted.

If Bush and his advisors imagine that the modern liberal program is the only one on which people can be elected, if they think that they must always proceed by "stealing the Democrats' fire," then they are looking a little too closely at the political chessboard. In 2003, the approved wisdom among the Republican and Democratic chess players in the state of California was that the way to stay in power was to run big deficits and give big favors to voters in "swing" groups. Since this program encourages expansive government, and modern liberals are into expansive government, it was a very popular program with people like Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, who hated each other because the latter wanted to increase the size of government much faster than the former wanted to. Most Republican politicians respected this wisdom and spent their time being embarrassed about "having" to vote against modern liberal legislation.

Then a recall drive blew up out of nowhere — actually out of a few disaffected individuals who found, by means of talk radio, that most people in the state had become as disaffected as they themselves were, no matter what their race, gender, or party registration happened to be. Davis was ousted, and Bustamante was defeated. This doesn't mean that the winner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a libertarian or even a conservative. It does mean that those who played too close to the game were missing — surprise! — a real perspective on the people's political concerns. There is a vast reservoir of public feeling that is highly unfavorable to much of modern liberalism. This is the feeling to which Bush might have appealed, and could still appeal, if he really wished to move the government in a new direction. And this public feeling is discovering new and more powerful means of manifesting itself in this electronic age.

In 1947, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, a distinguished French scientist with libertarian sympathies, published a work called "Human Destiny." It's a challenging book. One of its ideas frequently recurs to me. It's the idea of scale. If you look at an engraving with a magnifying glass, all you may see is little dots and smudges of black and white. But if you view it on a different "scale of observation," you'll see that it's a picture of George Washington. History looks different when you concern yourself with day to day events, and when you back off for a moment and try to see its long-range patterns.

I think of this when I find myself becoming upset by the petty insanities of the season's political affairs. On the one hand, we have the Democratic candidates for president, outbidding one another in promises of unearned income for the American people and hysterical accusations against the President. On the other hand, we have the President, outdoing the Democrats with weird "policy initiatives" and spending schemes. Seldom have the prospects of big government seemed better. But if that's all you see, you may be operating with the wrong scale of observation. Back off a little, and what do you see?

You see an era in which big promises are made, big schemes are proposed, and big lies are siphoned into eager ears. But why is this happening? It's happening because government is not big but small, in one very important respect: it enjoys small confidence from the people. It has no strong ideological program; it has no strong claim to respect; it is visibly failing in virtually everything it does, and virtually everyone is aware of its failures. Virtually everyone is also aware of the persons responsible for those failures — the chess players, the professional political class.

That class has one course of action available: to cling to power by promises, bribes, and transparent lies, such as the lies that Bush's opponents tell about him. Their attempts to keep power paint a picture of weakness. And — back off a little farther, and see a still larger picture — the current political scene is only an island in the great sweep of technological progress that is steadily freeing mankind from dependence on government for its sources of information and ideas and motives for action and morale.

On this scale of observation, the political coloration of President Bush makes no particular difference to one's picture of the world. Yes, I will vote for him. But I am prepared for the time when people will say, as they now say of the violent contests between Tilden and Hayes, Greeley and Grant, "What was that all about, anyway?"

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