08/29/11
Imperial Conservatism's Last Gasp Sam Tanenhaus
It was not so long ago that George W. Bush
seemed to embody the future of conservatism. He had entered office amid doubts
about his rightful place there, but pressed ahead nonetheless with grand
ambitions, conducting an ideologically potent foreign war while also promising
much at home. Which led some to wonder: Was this lavish spender really a
conservative? Bush’s champions rushed in to explain. The president, Fred Barnes
wrote approvingly in The Wall Street Journal in August 2003, was a “big
government conservative.” He believed, that is, in “using what would normally be
seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends.”Bush, influenced by neoconservatives inside his administration and beyond, practiced a conservatism that placed almost all its faith in the muscular powers of the executive—particularly in its aggressive prosecution of the war on terrorism. Even at the end of his presidency, as Republicans began to distance themselves from Bush, some continued to defend his style of conservatism. William Kristol, in a column published a month after Barack Obama’s victory, pleaded with conservatives to “think twice before charging into battle against Obama under the banner of ‘small-government conservatism’” when “in the real world of Republican governance, there aren’t a whole lot of small-government Republicans.”
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