Rarely has so widespread a view been so wrong. In fact, Bush is not merely conservative; he is more conservative than Ronald Reagan, the man whose ideological legacy he has supposedly betrayed. ~Peter Beinart

Ross and Reihan will be pleased (sort of) to see their point about discretionary domestic spending supported in this article, but beyond that I don’t think any conservative who has ever given the problem a moment’s thought will be in the least convinced.  Most entertaining of all was the claim that conservatives should apparently be happy about the passage of Medicare Part D because it is being run through private companies!  Oh, yes, I forgot, conservatives support public-private condominium arrangements and new entitlements, just like our hero, FDR!  Ahem.  Mr. Bush’s commitment to privatising Social Security was not terribly serious, but in fairness to him the failure of this reform can be laid at the Congress’ door just as much as it can be laid at his door.  This illustrates an ongoing theme: failure to fight for anything that conservatives might actually support, while forcing through abominations of government expansion that no one on the right wants.  The insane expansion of the instruments of the security state and homeland security bureaucracy is one of the clearest marks of the administration’s abandonment of conservatism–it is indeed Rooseveltian or Trumanesque in the absolute worst sense.  Above all, it is in his foreign policy that Mr. Bush has demonstrated his radical departure from conservatism, or rather gives expression to his own radicalism.  

The point is not that Reagan was ever exactly the paragon or model of conservative government.  He wasn’t, and people who try to make him into the gold standard of all conservatism wind up with some pretty strange positions.  The important distinction that sustains a positive memory of Reagan among conservatives is the awareness that he a) actually knew what conservatism was and b) was capable of articulating some of these ideas.  He had to confront at least one house of Congress under the control of the opposing party for the whole of his time in office.  His top judicial appointments, Scalia excepted, were therefore considerably weaker than Bush’s, and there was every reason to fear that Bush was going to blow both of his opportunities (the possibility of Justice Gonzales was always there); the Miers debacle was confirmation that the man didn’t even know what the question was.  He relented under pressure, which shows that he is a politician, not that he is deeply committed to “strict construction,” or any of the things he claims to favour.  Indeed “strict construction” is a view of the Constitution so far from his own that it is not even in the same galaxy.  On immigration, Bush has taken a Reagan-like position, which is not to say that he has taken the conservative position. 

Beinart thinks he has his silver bullet with Iraq, and here most conservatives have given him all the fodder he will need.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to lock into everyone’s minds that Iraq is somehow quintessentially a “conservative” project if you are on the left: it would not do for people to remember that this kind of damned idiotic interventionism and nation-building is exactly the left’s cup of tea, and that the “conservatives” in government have created a disaster by imitating JFK and LBJ. 

The few in the conservative opposition to the war can say in all seriousness that they objected to the war because it was unconservative, indeed anti-conservative, an ideologically driven war of revolution, but the Johnny-Come-Latelies to Iraq war skepticism and the “Bush isn’t conservative” meme have a lot more explaining to do.  They don’t really get to wash their hands of the violence they did to the meaning of conservatism and say, “Uh, Bush made me do it!”  If Bush wasn’t advancing the “conservative policy” on Iraq, what were all of you people doing following him? 

Beinart here has not succeeded in showing Bush to be a super-conservative, but has shown instead that a lot of people in the “movement” have lost their way and have embraced plenty of things that never were conservative positions in the first place.  Aiming to “tar” Bush with conservatism–as a roundabout way to attach conservatism to every failed policy of Mr. Bush–Beinart missed the much bigger, more tempting target, which is the philosophical vacuity of large parts of the conservative “movement.”  The way out of this predicament for conservatives is to try to recover at least some of what has been lost, cast down the idols of interventionism and Big Government conservatism and make it clear that GOP failures in the Bush years have stemmed from the sorry attempt to use the Leviathan for “conservative purposes” rather than smashing it and reducing it to something more like its constitutionally designated limits.  The lesson of the Bush era is that big government solutions, social engineering and massive spending simply fail, no matter who is running them and no matter the ostensible goal; finding “market solutions” for entitlement programs works mainly to make those undesirable programs more expensive.