"Lyndon Baines" Bush Upsets Conservatives and Threatens Party Prospects

I have potential bad news. Conservatives and Republicans are beginning to act like liberals and Democrats. No, they're not smoking dope and fixing elections. Rather, philosophical differences could divide the Republican Party, like differences of the left divided the Democrats and cost them political influence.

Many conservative Republicans who donated their time and money to elect President Bush are not pleased at his departures from typical conservative goals. Conservatives in general like smaller government and less government spending. Conservatives tend to be pro-life and want to know that Supreme Court nominees have expressed clear support for that issue. Yet, President Bush continues to disappoint them. In addition, many compare Bush to LBJ, who turned up the treasury printing press for "guns and butter"--in his case, the Viet Nam war and the Great Society. If there is any valid comparison of the war in Iraq with Viet Nam, it may be on this point of thinking we can have it all. But, I don't want a return of inflation and increasing government debt that can result. Essentially, what we've seen is that President Bush ran on a conservative platform but only pays it lip service, and this has been causing cracks in his party since he was re-elected.

This, of course, will likely have the result of dampening enthusiasm of conservatives, who would give up on their efforts to re-elect Republicans and just go back to working, raising kids, and other things for which there are greater rewards and less frustration. The party would be divided and become the minority party again. That's a real and serious danger.

For several days I was thinking about an article in The Economist, which first addresses the Delay indictments, but goes on to explain the tensions and realignments of conservatives, which is the point of this entry. After the latest Supreme Court nomination, the divisions reported by this article become more real.

This is something that conservatives and the Republicans really need to address to avoid a similar fate of the Democrats, where those in the mainstream were replaced by the Move-On radicals. Here are some excerpts from that article, but you need to read the entire story for more explanation of each point.

Today the conservative movement is in turmoil. Different types of conservatives are at each other’s throats. Everybody is hurling opprobrium at the president. David Brooks, a conservative columnist on the New York Times, recently declared that he sometimes wonders whether Mr Bush is a Manchurian candidate�sent to discredit conservatism.

The loudest howls are coming from small-government conservatives who are furious with Mr Bush’s loose spending. But business conservatives are furious about his love-affair with the religious right and traditional conservatives are furious about his commitment of blood and treasure to the Iraq war.

These rows are particularly dangerous because they reflect long-standing tensions within the conservative movement:
• Small-government conservatives v big-government conservatives.
• Conservatives of faith v conservatives of doubt.
• Insurgent conservatives v establishment conservatives.
• Business conservatives v religious conservatives.
• Neo-conservatives v traditional conservatives.

Predictions of the demise of American conservatism are almost as old as the movement. It survived both Watergate and Bill Clinton. Emmett Tyrell, the editor of the American Spectator, published “The Conservative Crack-up� in 1992. So much of the right’s power lies outside the administration and Congress�in its domination of the intellectual agenda for instance�that it is seldom down for long.

The Democrats show few signs that they have the wind in their sails. Their handling of John Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been dismal. Neither Harry Reid, the minority leader in the Senate, nor Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House, is likely to set the world on fire. Moveon.org types want to drag the party to the left; Clintonistas want to pull it to the centre. America has two dysfunctional parties.

But Mr Bush’s recent problems do raise one important possibility: that of a realignment on the right. The fact that the Bush machine is running out of steam makes it much less likely that he will be able to determine his successor. This creates opportunities for very different sorts of conservatives who are waiting in the wings.

Will Bush continue on his path of appeasing the left and ignoring his conservative base, and what effect will that have in the next election? Why is he doing this? I don't know if he lacks commitment or doesn't have the fight in him to stand up for his base. But, if something isn't done to mend the cracks within the party, look for the Democrats to regain control of Congress and, possibly, the presidency. It may not matter, though, because with the White House over-spending and increasing the size of government, there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between the parties. Who, if anyone, will step up to save the party and its movement?