Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary.

Recipient Addresses:

Separate each address with a comma.

Your E-mail Address: Message:

In 1976, when he first ran for the Republican presidential nomination against Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan was generally seen as the leader of a fringe movement, audaciously challenging the moderate, business-focused establishment of the party. Today, 25 years after Reagan assumed office, it is hard to exaggerate his influence on American politics in general and on the conservative movement in particular. Many of the once-controversial elements of his philosophy—tax cuts to spur economic growth, a build-up of American defense forces, confronting totalitarianism abroad, an end to welfare dependency at home—are today embraced by most (but not all) Republicans and even some Democrats, and the conservative movement he headed has effectively become the established core of the GOP. This transformation has been one of the great ideological triumphs in American politics.

Yet, for much of the tenure of George W. Bush, the man most often said to have inherited Reagan's mantle, conservatives have been voicing dismay over the state of their movement. Over the past year, significant fissures have opened up within the old “Reagan coalition” over foreign policy, immigration, and other issues, but most especially over the growth in federal spending and the size of government. Indeed, a number of conservatives have recently taken to arguing that the expansion of government programs under Bush amounts to an an out-and-out betrayal of Reagan's legacy.

Does this matter? As controversial as Bush's domestic record has been, his reputation as a President will almost certainly depend on the success or failure of our campaign in Iraq and the war on terror. Although his management of that effort has been the subject of harsh criticism from some Republicans and conservative columnists, relatively few are prepared to say that the effort itself is at odds with Reaganism.

Even in the area of domestic policy, moreover, Bush's record has won universal praise from his conservative base on at least some issues. His 2001 tax cuts are widely credited with having turned around a moribund stock market. Despite a slowdown in the fourth quarter of 2005, the economy has performed strongly over the past two years, with inflation, unemployment, and interest rates all at satisfyingly low levels. The successful appointment to the Supreme Court of two solidly conservative judges has burnished Bush's stature among legal conservatives who were momentarily chagrined by the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination. His uncompromising stands on abortion and gay marriage are likewise deeply appreciated. Nor has Bush ever been coy about the centrality of his religious faith, which, whether it has informed policy-making or not, has given him a deep personal tie with Christian conservatives and evangelicals.

But beneath and despite all this, there is a rankling discontent over the escalating size and scope of government under Bush, and over the sins of corruption and self-dealing that are seen to be its inevitable accompaniment (“that closed, parasitic culture of convenience,” as Andrew Ferguson wrote in the Weekly Standard, “with its revolving doors, front groups, pay-offs, expense-account comfort, and ideological cover stories”). More and more frequently, in one form or another, it is said that Bush has led both conservatives and the GOP in an unprincipled and politically risky direction. The charge now shadows the mid-term election cycle, even as it sets the stage for a more contentious battle over the choice of Bush's successor in 2008.

_____________

Grumblings over the state of core conservative principles reached a crescendo this past January when the lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, tax evasion, and bribery of public officials. A high-profile figure in Washington circles, Abramoff had been a close ally of the conservative activist Grover Norquist and through various schemes and front groups had funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican Congressmen. Aiming a barbed arrow at the heart of the Bush administration, Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter, excoriated the susceptibility of too many Republicans to the enticements of a free-spending government. “Political corruption,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “is always more likely when you fall in love with the steamroller.”

The Abramoff implosion, loud as it was, capped a long period of steadily mounting conservative resentment at the administration's spending habits. “What we have now is a President who spends like Carter and panders like Clinton,” complained Veronique de Rugy and Tad DeHaven, two analysts at the libertarian Cato Institute, in 2003. The signing of a particularly bloated transportation bill last July impelled George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal to assert that “Bush has few peers among American Presidents in his willingness to let Congress spend as freely as it always wants to do.” More recently, the President's plan to spend more than $100 billion to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina led to what the Washington Post described as the “loudest and most widespread dissent Bush has faced from his own party since it took full control of Congress in 2002.” And projections of still growing deficits in the most recent federal budget have once again unleashed charges that the administration has wandered disastrously from the Reaganite path. As Jonah Goldberg charged in National Review, “too many in the GOP have felt the rush that comes with giving out other people's money. . . . We have confused ‘low taxes’—which we all like—with limited government, which we don't have.”

_____________

No one has made the case more forcefully than Bruce Bartlett in his new book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. ¹ In its tone of outright contempt for the President, the book is reminiscent of anti-Bush screeds by left-wing journalists like Molly Ivins or David Corn. But its substance is not so easily dismissed. For many years, Bartlett, an expert on the federal budget, has been a respected observer of and participant in Republican politics, holding Treasury posts in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and serving on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. In hundreds of newspaper columns over the last two decades he has cogently made the case for policies of low taxation and limited government.

But in the last few years Bartlett has become something of a Republican apostate, at least when it comes to this administration. Most of Bush's governing philosophy, he charges in this book, is not just at odds with but antithetical to the traditional conservative agenda. So great is the economic damage wrought by Bush's policies, in Bartlett's judgment, that it can be reversed only by means of dramatic tax increases—a stunning conclusion from one who has devoted much of his career to arguing for supply-side tax cuts.

In the opening pages, Bartlett summarizes both his credentials and the essence of his case:

I write as a Reaganite, by which I mean someone who believes in the historical conservative philosophy of small government, federalism, free trade, and the Constitution as originally understood by the Founding Fathers. On that basis, Bush is clearly not a Reaganite or “small c” conservative. Philosophically, he has more in common with liberals, who see no limits on state power as long as it is used to advance what they think is right. In the same way, Bush has used government to pursue a “conservative” agenda as he sees it. But that is something that runs totally contrary to the restraints and limits to power inherent in the very nature of traditional conservatism.

The list of Bartlett's grievances is lengthy. Whereas Reagan-era policies stressed the importance of small business, the Bush administration prefers to bestow its favors on large companies, reviving the big-business corporatism that characterized Republican politics of the Eisenhower era. Where pro-growth conservatives stand for multilateral free trade, the Bush administration has pursued select free-trade agreements while raising protectionist subsidies for American agriculture, a move reminiscent of Herbert Hoover. On domestic social policy, Bartlett groups Bush with Richard Nixon, wondering aloud whether history will judge them as “two superficially conservative Presidents who enacted liberal programs in order to buy votes for reelection.”

Eisenhower, Hoover, Nixon—these names, in some conservative circles, are like red flags. But do the charges hold up? On inspection, the evidence for each is decidedly mixed.

While Bush's policies do seem to have benefited large corporations, small-business owners have not been complaining. To the contrary, they have loudly applauded his tax cuts and his support for litigation reform, and, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, they are more optimistic about economic conditions today than at any time in the past 30 years. On trade, it is true that Bush has pursued imperfect regional agreements (just as Reagan himself initiated a bilateral U.S.-Canada agreement) in lieu of multilateral pacts. But Bartlett barely acknowledges the unwillingness of the European Union to lower its own agricultural subsidies—a central obstacle to freer global trade. Finally, while Bartlett offers anecdotal evidence that earlier Treasury departments were more thorough in their vetting procedures, he seems to have forgotten the improvisational nature of some of Reagan's economic policies. David Stockman, the chief of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Reagan term, would famously recall how he and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger arbitrarily arrived at cuts in the defense budget while locked in negotiations.

Indeed, Bartlett's analysis is altogether reminiscent of the sky-is-falling tenor of Stockman's 1986 memoir, The Triumph of Politics, written after he resigned as White House budget director and bearing the subtitle, “How the Reagan Revolution Failed.” Stockman believed that Reagan's unwillingness to cut spending doomed future generations to fiscal peril. In Impostor, Bartlett makes a similar argument. His own agent of impending calamity is the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, passed by Republicans at the insistence of the President and, by Bartlett's lights, the “worst legislation in history.”

_____________

---

---

---

© 2009 Commentary Inc.