Ideology Has Consequences by Jeffrey Hart THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE

[applegrove]

"November 20, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
Ideology Has Consequences
Bush rejects the politics of prudence.
by Jeffrey Hart"

"Many Republicans must feel like that legendary man at the bar on the Titanic. Watching the iceberg slide by outside a porthole, he remarked, “I asked for ice. But this is too much.” Republicans voted for a Republican and got George W. Bush, but his Republican Party is unrecognizable as the party we have known.

Recall the Eisenhower Republican Party. Eisenhower, a thoroughgoing realist, was one of the most successful presidents of the 20th century. So was the prudential Reagan, wary of using military force. Nixon would have been a good secretary of state, but emotionally wounded and suspicious, he was not suited to the presidency. Yet he, too, with Henry Kissinger, was a realist. George W. Bush represents a huge swing away from such traditional conservative Republicanism.

But the conservative movement in America has followed him, evacuating prudence and realism for ideology and folly. Left behind has been the experienced realism of James Burnham. Also vacated, the Burkean realism of Willmoore Kendall, who aspired, as he told Leo Strauss, to be the “American Burke.” That Burkeanism entailed a sense of the complexity of society and the resistance of cultures to change. Gone, too, has been the individualism of Frank Meyer and the commonsense Western libertarianism of Barry Goldwater.

The post-2000 conservative movement has abandoned all that to back Bush and has followed him over the cliff into our calamity in Iraq. On top of all that, the Bush presidency has been fueled by the moral authoritarianism of the current third evangelical awakening.

..........SNIP"

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_20/article.html

[applegrove]

1. Not just the neocons who are disavowing BUSH. Seems everyone is.

[pnwmom]

4. The American Conservative has been disavowing him for years.

Its writers, and other conservative thinkers like them, are part of the reason the Repubs lost the election.

[applegrove]

6. Didn't know American Conservative was so far ahead. So the neocons

were the last then to disavow. That makes better sense. Iraq was after all their dream.

[Demeter]

2. Arguing From Lies Creates Error

Reagan was neither prudent nor successful; he was gaga or asleep, when not actually breaking laws.
Anyone who calls Kissinger a realist should consider the fact that he's not free to travel due to the countries that want him on trial for war crimes.

And Bush is the logical extension of the policies of these men, and Nixon before them: from war crimes to Apocalypse.

I cannot comment on Eisenhower, as I was barely born then, and haven't researched his history.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Ike wasn't so bad.

He's the only one of the lot I would make that claim for. The only Republican in the 20th Century who I think could be plausibly argued to have left a legacy of more good than bad. By running & winning in 1952, he spiked the Presidential ambitions of Douglas MacArthur, thereby keeping us out of a drastic rightward turn & maybe a nuclear war in the Far East. I think he was responsible behind the scenes for the weakening & eventual crash of Joe McCarthy also. He sold the Interstate highway system to the nation under the guise of defense. He warned against the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex, and spoke clearly about the consequences of diverting money from humane purposes to militarism. He was a general who knew and hated war. He got into power by promising to bring the American military home from the undeclared war in Korea.

[pnwmom]

5. I agree, Jackpine Radical. He was a worthy adversary.

[yellowcanine]

7. But Ike's great failing was he gave us Nixon. And Ike did not need Nixon nor is there

much evidence that he actually liked him. Ike could easily have won election and reelection without Nixon. He should have dumped him after that horrible "Checkers" speech.

And also, Ike messed up in Vietnam. If he had pushed for the 1956 elections to go forward Ho Chi Min would have won and the whole Vietnam War could have been avoided.