Conservatives bashing Bush!

A fun parlor game a lot of liberal bloggers are playing these days is, check out what conservatives are saying about Pres. Bush:

Ben Domenech On issue after issue, Republicans have given in to the wisdom of the MSM and the beltway talking heads instead of listening to their constituents and the conservative political base. On the size of government, on immigration and on issues of federal power, Republicans have adopted the same Washington strategies that doomed the Democrats in the 1994 cycle… They've grown fat and happy on pork contracts, and forgotten why they were sent to this town in the first place. Even President Bush is guilty of this - would a White House that put principle before patronization, listened to its base, and remained focused on election season ever make the gargantuan mistake of nominating Harriet Miers? Of course not…

Bruce Bartlett: Author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," [former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett] called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

Larry Wilkerson: "My mum wrote me a letter the other day and she said, 'Son,' - she's 86 years old - she said, 'Son, please don't become a Democrat'.And I told my mum, I called her and I said: 'Mum, you know what? I want my party back. I don't want to become a Democrat. I want my party back.' The Republican Party that I knew, that I grew up in, a moderate party, a party that believed in fiscal discipline, a party that believed in small government, a party that had genuine conservative values. This is not a conservative leadership. This is radical leadership. I called them neo-Jacobins. They are radical. They're not conservative. They've stolen my party and I would like my party back."

And there’s lots, lots more where that came from. Andrew Sullivan says the attempts by the “left” to discredit Bush is a backdoor attempt to discredit conservatism generally:

It's important for the left to knee-cap conservative critics of this administration in order to discredit conservatism as a whole by conflating it with the Bush debacle. That's what these smears against Bartlett and me are about. Krugman's gambit, of course, is to deny the facts of a massive explosion in spending under Bush. He's stuck because he hates Bush but loves the spending. And so he decides to smear not those conservatives who went along for the ride; but those conservatives who got it right sooner than many. If he can discredit us, then his ideology advances. And that, rather than intellectual honesty, is what he cares about and what he represents.

Turn Sullivan around: what I’m afraid of is, conservatives will successfully argue that the failed Bush (and the failed Republican Congress) were not conservative in the first place. Hence we need to elect real conservatives (McCain of all people!). And when the real conservatives fail, we’ll say that they were never real conservatives in the first place, and elect some true real conservatives. Nice trick!

I want to run this hypothesis up the flag pole and see if anybody salutes. The problem is not Bush per se, but conservatism. Conservatism – at least economic conservatism, i.e. reliance on free markets to solve economic and sometimes social problems – is unsustainable in a democratic society. The reason: free markets have no constituency. Liberalism has a natural constituency. Social Security – well, we all grow old, and over half of us get most of our retirement income from Social Security when we do, so people will vote to create and defend Social Security. Universal health care – 45 million Americans do not have health care, and lots of them vote; many more millions have inadequate or overly expensive health care and would vote for a better system; so if it’s packaged right, universal health care is a winning issue. Policies that strengthen unions and protect workers have broad support because most Americans work for a living.

Contrast this with conservativism. What’s the constituency for “small government”? Small government may, as the conservatives argue, be in the general interest (I think not, but that's another debate), but it attracts the interest of no particular large voting bloc. Or take the environment. The conservative position on, say, global warming, that which Hayek or Friedman would advocate (I think), would be a hefty tax on gasoline. Set the market price equal to the marginal social cost; let businesses and consumers adjust to the market price. But where’s the constituency for gasoline taxes? The politically sustainable policies are those we’ve seen from the Bush administration: denial of the problem of global warming (there are always votes for “lets do nothing about a problem that is not yet staring us in the face”), subsidies for ethanol producers, oil companies, coal companies, etc.

The problem was identified by Mancur Olson and others. The benefits (if they indeed exist) of pro-growth, pro-market policies are diffuse, and therefore they lack a constituency. So Republicans, even those who claim to run as conservatives, have to switch gears when they attain office. If they can’t offer policies that redistribute from rich to poor and middle class – the Democrats have that locked up – they will redistribute in the other direction. Clip here and there from the incomes of the middle class in subtle ways that don’t tick them off too badly, and transfer big chunks of money to business interests and the extraordinarily wealthy, who can then reward them with money with which to run campaigns that package their policies in an attractive way to those who are being pinched. In other words, the natural Republican stance is not pro-market but pro-business, and pro-extraordinarily-narrow-business-interest at that. Conservativism looks good (sometimes) in theory, but when conservatives come to power they will invariably turn into crony capitalists.

So you can complain all you want that Bush has betrayed conservative principles, but Bush is not the problem, conservativism is. Practically speaking, we can elect Democrats who redistribute income from the top to the middle and bottom, or Republicans who redistribute it from everywhere to the people and business interests willing to finance their campaigns. There is no conservative option.