Some of these commentators, particularly the economic conservatives, have valid complaints, though like the rest of us they must face the fact that things would have been even worse under a Democratic administration. ~Joseph Bottum

Actually, Bush’s critics don’t have to face any such thing, because it probably isn’t true.  Perversely, because of the desire to oppose the other party, Republicans are much more reliably conservative when they are confronted with a Democratic President.  Besides, every Republican administration of the last forty years has been in many respects a catastrophe for controlling the growth of government in particular–Mr. Bush has the unfortunate distinction of being the worst offender, and he doesn’t even have the convenient excuse that the other party was in control of Congress.  

The myth of Republican fiscal competence has been one of the more powerful ones confusing and misleading conservatives over the years.  Aside from a few years in the late ’90s, Republicans have been pathetically bad at avoiding deficits and even worse at stopping new government initiatives during their time in power.  With one of their own in the White House, restraint disappeared completely.  It is not only unlikely that a Gore or Kerry administration would have been substantially worse, since Congressional Republicans would probably have made things very difficult for their agenda, but I would even go so far as to say that either of them might well have been substantially better–which doesn’t mean that either would have been particularly good.  If we must engage in the old “lesser of two evils” game, it is no longer obvious that having the GOP control the White House is automatically the lesser evil.  It certainly isn’t obvious in the case of Mr. Bush.   

Consider the last four elected Republican Presidents.  Nixon institutionalised Great Society programs that were set to sunset, then signed off on OSHA, the EPA and also imposed wage and price controls.  What the exact difference is between what he did and what Humphrey would have done eludes me.  “Watch what we do, not what we say” might as well be the GOP slogan for all time.  Reagan ramped up military spending and tolerated high domestic spending as the payoff.  He may have had strong arguments for doing so, but the bottom line is that the federal government grew considerably bigger during his tenure.  The less said about Bush the Elder with his tax hikes and signing off on the ADA, the better.  Meanwhile, for at least half of the twelve years that there have been Democratic Presidents in the last generation, the expansion of government was not reversed but its expansion was not quite as explosive–this was because Republicans recovered some sense of a reason to oppose big government when there was a Democratic President to target as the supporter of big government. 

Of course, GOP commitment to small government has always been notoriously poor.  Even during those revolutionary days of the mid-’90s, there was only marginal improvement.  Government spending increased more rapidly after the 1994 “revolution” than the rate of increase during unified government from 1993-95.  After the shutdown battle, Republicans learned to stop worrying and love the pork. 

It seems hard to believe that any Democratic administration could have gotten away with expanding government at a faster rate or in more idiotic ways than Mr. Bush did.  Whenever there is a Democrat in the White House, obviously because of their campaign rhetoric and the history of Democratic welfare state-building, everyone is prepared to oppose any new expansions of government the Democrat may propose.  For some reason, though, when a Republican takes office everyone relaxes and actually believes the candidate’s promises to limit the size of government–why do they do this?  Further, why do they all then roll over when he begins increasing the size and role of government?  Can it really be as straightforward as pathetic partisan loyalty?  Probably. 

With a Democrat in the White House after the elections of 2000 or 2004, the GOP would have rediscovered the virtues of balanced budgets, because it would have been to their advantage to resist administration budget proposals.  They would have killed something like a Medicare Part D had it come from a Democratic administration.  They would have fought tooth and nail to stop something like Bush’s appalling education bill, had it come from someone in the other party.  That is depressing enough, but what is far more depressing is that there are plenty of people, including Joseph Bottum, who think that we somehow avoided a worse fate by enduring Bush.   

On foreign policy, escalation of existing conflicts and military adventurism have been the general trademarks of Republican administrations since 1968.  Based on this dubious record of accomplishment, they were for a while considered the serious party when it came to foreign policy–which sometimes had the depressing reality of being only too true.  (When you have to choose between the Kissingers and the Brzezinskis of the world, you really want to believe that someone is playing a trick on you and that they will soon present you with the real choice.) 

For those of us on the right who regard fairly militaristic and reckless foreign policy of this kind to be profoundly mistaken and contrary to the best interests of America, it is difficult to look back with any great joy at the Republican administrations of the last forty years.  Indeed, the Democratic administrations hardly inspire much admiration, either, but some the major flaws of these administrations have been by and large the very things (i.e., silly talk of promoting democracy and supporting dissidents against our own authoritarian allies; careless use of the military) that many admirers of Mr. Bush regard as virtues of this administration.  The “freedom agenda” is not terribly different in substance from the rhetoric of Jimmy Carter–Bush has differed from Carter in that he actually tries to implement the bad ideas Carter mostly just talked about. 

What Republicans once recognised as loopy nation-building and utopianism in the ’90s, they suddenly embraced as fundamental to national security.  Since so many “conservatives” today like to throw the withdrawal from Somalia in the Democrats’ face as the signal of weakness that Bin Laden cited as his evidence that America was not up for a real right, it is worth asking these people: which party got us into Somalia (the GOP), which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs denied the mission in Mogadishu the necessary armour (Powell), and which part of the electorate demanded that we pull out after the fighting in Mogadishu killed eighteen of our soldiers (primarily Republican voters)?  Of course, Clinton was right to leave Somalia, just as he was profoundly wrong to attempt the nation-building farce and just as Bush the Elder was a fool for ever getting involved in that country in the first place.  Yet many of the people who ridiculed and despised Clinton not for leaving Somalia but for staying as long as we did are now some of the very same people who cheer on Mr. Bush as he engages in nation-building and refuses to leave Iraq.  The lesson is that GOP voters, for the most part, will tolerate precisely the same disastrous, horrible, ill-conceived policies they would normally denounce as treacherous globalist villainy provided that the man committing the country to this course of action has the right party affiliation. 

Where Republicans normally questioned the credibility of a Democratic President when he would launch irrational military campaigns that seemed irrelevant or even damaging to the national interest, they happily went along with any Bush proposal, no matter how far-fetched or obviously nonsensical.  This is not because they all suddenly suffered psychotic breaks and possessed entirely new personalities–it was because one of “their” guys told them it was necessary and patriotic, and so they (with a very few exceptions) followed him in perfect docility.  It seems entirely likely that had a President Gore attempted to launch an invasion of Iraq (or any other country), the Republican majority would have been leading the charge to question his competence and damn his plans as either foolhardy or part of a giant deception against the American people.  They might well have been right, but for some twisted reason (based, I guess, in the fact that Carter dithered during the hostage crisis but Reagan presided over the unforgiveable deployment to Lebanon, which proved that Carter was the foreign policy naif) the obvious deceit of a Republican President on a matter of national security seems inconceivable to the same people who were quite glad to question the “convenient” timing of the 1998 attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan or the timing of Desert Fox during the impeachment process.  Of course, the Republicans were right to question Clinton’s honesty and judgement then–why, then, do they assume that someone else from their own party entrusted with the same immense executive power would not abuse that power?  Why reflexively assume, against most of the experience of the last thirty years, that Republicans are better stewards of the executive branch?