Back in the 2000 election, in my ongoing discussions with a republican pen pal, I predicted to him that if George Bush was elected, he and his party would have cause to regret it. As it is, Bush didn't get elected per se, but assumed office nonetheless; and now, while I don't claim any powers of clairvoyance, my prediction has more or less come true: George W. Bush is destroying the republican party as we know it.
My argument to my friend Roy back then was simple: that Bush's tenure would finally unleash the entire radicalism that has characterized the reactionary party since at least 1994, and that this in turn would cause a public backlash. Nonsense, quoth he, people are down with eliminating Social Security, teaching creationism, forced pregnancy, trickle-down economics, SDI, 'strict constructionism', abstinence education and all the other recycled, twice-hashed-over crap that the other side peddles. My reply was that while people might like those ideas in the abstract (even if that is debatable, but let's assume it for the sake of argument), but that the real test was going to be whether these policies actually delivered on their promised results. I said back in 2000 that the empirical evidence for such efficacy was tenuous at best.
Well, after the Supreme Court coup of December 2000, my friend was giddy with glee, since all those wackjob ideas would now receive their test without measurable Democratic interference. Towards the summer of 2001, he was already getting restless, as Bush's approval ratings sank and the public began to turn on him and his party. Then, of course, came 9/11, and the entire agenda received a fresh burst of steam, as it were.
So here we are now in 2006, and basically everything that I predicted back then has come true. Trickle-down has not produced a roaring economy; it has, however, produced gargantuan deficits. Abstinence education - which my friend Aaron, a well-placed California republican, insists works - has a failure rate of 88%. SDI still doesn't work, and probably never will. People who implement creationism in the schools are tossed out of office by outraged parents. 'Strict constructionism' is now seen by the public as code for 'right-wing wackjobs making law'. Social Security privatization went down in flames. Then, there are all the other disasters nobody could have foreseen in 2000: the Iraq war, which we are in the terminal stages of losing; hurricane Katrina, the recovery from which is the usual and expected shambles; the Medicare drug benefit, which has turned American seniors into lab rats in Milton Friedman's laboratory; the WTC redevelopment, which is a national disgrace at this point; the loss of three million manufacturing jobs; Abramoff; a housing bubble; the list goes on. If you want to know why Bushism is failing, consider Dick Cheney's quote to the effect that 'deficits don't matter'. They don't, for a time. But in the end, they do matter - a lot.
I'd argue that we as a nation are in the beginning stages of a paradigm shift in our political attitudes. New Deal liberalism ran out of steam in the 1980s, in part because it had succeeded too well; now, the same thing is happening to its ideological antipode, Reaganism, because it has demonstrably failed as a philosophy of governance. I was always cynical about George Bush's prospects for grasping Reagan's mantle, in part because I was a teenager in the 1980s and remember the old man's extraordinary ability to connect with the people on a level beyond policy disagreement; Bush's pretend populism was never on a par with that, for all the evident desire of his constituency to have it be otherwise.
That brings us to the core deficiency of reactionary right-wing conservatism. FDR's legacy dominated American discourse for half a century, long after the protean genius of Roosevelt was extinguished. The New Deal still endures; because it addressed the concerns of the vital center of American society. Reaganism in its heyday can be argued to have, in fits and spurts, attempted to have done the same; but it required, and still does, a marketing gloss that is dependent on a popular face. However, a policy framework that can't be implemented on its own merits is weak. It is this core philosophical weakness that is behind the collapsing job approval ratings of a man who is no longer just disfavored, but despised.
I've always considered the structural timbers of the house that Reagan built to be unsound, in part because they largely failed the practicality test. Reaganomics as fiscal policy never worked, which is why he is the architect of the largest tax increase in our history. As to the economic policy spawned by Reagan, take a look at our airline industry, our manufacturing base, and our trade deficit. On the social agenda, say what you will, but Americans are not willing to have the religious preferences of a minority legislated for all of us; which is perhaps why Reagan, who was divorced and never went to church, largely stayed away from ground where his acolytes have trod in very heavy boots.
George Bush has taken that unsound house and held a match to its timbers. Not willingly, mind you; but that's a fair description of what enacting the entire right-wing agenda amounts to in practice. As a result, to appropriate a phrase, Reaganism is in its last throes; and Bushism, whatever that is, is dead. It's hard to imagine any future candidate claiming Bush's legacy. It would be easy to point to George Bush's personal inadequacies - the lack of curiosity, the delusions of grandeur or even adequacy, the partisanship, the stubbornness - as reasons for his failure. In fact, that argument is already beginning to take hold, especially among the few remaining neo-conservatives - that the underlying ideas are sound, and that the problem was the implementation. Nothing could be further from the truth; even the best execution can't save policies that are flawed to begin with.
So the question before is this: what will the next paradigm of American governance be? A revived, if likely moderate, liberalism, or a revived, if possibly more moderate, conservatism, perhaps one worthy of the name? Presently, I would place my bets on the former option. It would be good for partisans on both sides to remember that the American people are neither conservative nor liberal as a whole, but pragmatic moderates.