As a political junkie, I am known to collect (well, hoard) reading material of all sorts - magazines, newspapers, GAO reports, opinions from the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal - and save them under my bed, in drawers, and on closet shelves until I can read them.
As a lawyer working at a big law firm/sweat shop, I often don't get a chance to read these materials for many many months.
So it was when I picked up the July 26, 2003 National Journal magazine and turned to an article by Jonathan Rauch entitled "The Accidental Radical." It was a fascinating - and often frightening - analysis (and 2013 "retrospective") of the Bush presidency.
Read on for the story.
Rauch's theory is that, in many many ways, George Bush is the 21st century's Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Superficially speaking, both sought and won the presidency after short stints as Governors of large states (FDR - 4 years [2 terms]; GWB - 6 years [1.5 terms]), although Rauch does not mention that FDR had already been a candidate for Vice-President and had held other elective office. GWB was called a "lightweight trading on a famous name"; FDR was dismissed as a man
"without any important qualifications for office." During their campaigns, both men were seen as intellectually inferior - FDR "seemed to have no clear philosophy." GWB was just a nice guy surrounding himself with smart people.
The manner in which both men governed, however, is where the comparison gets striking - and it's where Rauch calls them both "radicals." Both have seized the power of the presidency and stretched it to its limits. FDR enlarged the size of the federal government (from 3% to 10% of GDP from 1930 to 1940), "launched the welfare state, invented the modern regulatory state, and turned a provincial nation into a superpower. He had seized the Progressives' centralizing agenda, thrust it upon what had been a dourly Jeffersonian party, and used it to weld together the coalition - unionists, farmers, Northern blacks, Southern populists, and urban liberals - that brought the Democrats to dominance for a generation." As for Bush:
Taxes: Annual cuts aimed at changing the structure of the tax code to reduce rates on capital accumulation.
Spending: Increased spending more in 3 years than Clinton did in 8 - farm bill, education bill, and Medicare are the biggest expansions in entitlement programs since the Great Society. Significant expansion of federal government in each of his 3 years.
Role of government: Inserting the feds even further into education policy (NCLB), huge new bureaucracy (Homeland Security).
Treaties: rejected Kyoto, small-arms agreement, biological weapons agreement, Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, International Criminal Court, withdrew from Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - almost all before Sept. 11.
Foreign Policy: repudiated doctrine of containment and upending 5 decades of Middle East policy.
Both presidents "act with a unifying style - energetic, daring, even radical in the sense of starting from scratch - but not with an evident philosophical unity....[T]he lack of an evident governing principle gives rise to suspicions. Perhaps the only principle is to win."
Rauch astutely points out that the Republican party has abandonned the "smaller government" stands of Reagan and Goldwater - because people didn't want smaller government. The philosophy has been replaced with one that holds that government's purpose is to give people choices. "If you spend more money, people like you. If you give them more choices, they like you. But if you spend more money giving them more choices, they really like you." The point is not so much to change the size of government as its structure. Says our favorite wing-nut, Grover Norquist, of each Republican "reform":
"The Democratic Party - trial lawyers, labor union leaders, the two wings of the dependency movement (people on welfare, people who manage welfare), the coercive utopians (people who tells us our cars should be teeny), government employees - all the parts of that coaltion shrink and our coaltion grows, every time you make one of these reforms."
Rauch cements the FDR/GWB analogy by suggesting that GWB, like FDR with the Democratic party, is turning the Republican party in the party of "progress." The GOP grabs the traditionally Dem "progressive" label by passing reform after reform, challenging the old way of doing things (the old way that "does not work"), and tagging liberalism as "reactionary," backward looking, and stubborn and the Dem party as the "party of nostalgia."
The result is (or might be?) a radical realignment in partisan loyalties of the like that hasn't happened since....you guessed it, FDR.
What's the point? In the end, whether Bush's "new conservatism" works is an open question. Rauch "quotes" a "noted historian" looking back on the Bush Presidency in 2019. It's lengthy but worth reading, cuz in reality people, it's pretty scary:
...The war with Iraq went well, but the occupation afterward deteriorated into a slow bloodletting. Military personnel disliked and resented serving in Iraq; their families protested; the steady toll of casualties discouraged the public. Re-enlistment rates sagged and the military was pinned down - all at a time when Bush was multiplying U.S. commitments. By the middle of his second term, American forces were spread thinner and scattered more widely than ever before, but readiness and morale were declining. In 2006, Bush was forced to float the idea of a military draft. His prestige never fully recovered from the ensuing backlash."
Whoa. This was written 10 months ago? It's happening already - witness NPR's interview with the two Generals today.
America was weaker, yet the threat had grown. Bush's pre-emption policy was read, first by North Korea and Iran, and then by other troublesome states, as an invitation to arm up with nuclear weapons before Bush could stop them. One member of the 'axis of evil' ... had been defeated, but by 2006 the other two had become nuclear powers, and other nations were rushing to follow. With so much nuclear proliferation on so many fronts, the administration found itself with few options but to downplay the very threats that it had once painted so starkly.
Rauch describes how a premature Palestinian state had degenerated into a haven for terrorists who turned their terror not just on Israel but on US interests. When Israel threatened war, European nations stepped in as "trustee", but their forces were not able or willing to confront and disarm militants. In the end, Bush had helped create a new rogue state.
And today Bush announces a radical departure from Middle East policy in terms of Israeli settlements and the right of Palestinian return. I fear that Bush has pushed the peace process back another 10-20 years, but at least Rauch's prediction won't come true. Right? I guess instead Palestinian terrorists will target US interest, they just won't have a state...
Bush's opponents charged that the world was now more dangerous than before, and America's strategic position weaker. ... First in the 2006 congressional campaign and then in the 2008 presidential election, the new call for 'strategic disengagement' caught hold. Left-wing pacifism and right-wing isolationism, both fringe movements when Bush took office, found new strength with mainstream voters. America, assertive and confident when Bush took over, had become gun-shy and inward-looking. <snip>
... The demands of an overstretched military and an aging population, combined with Bush's tax cuts, had created a permanent fiscal crisis. Nor had the economy grown as hoped. Bush had let federal spending soar, both for the military and for entitlement programs, and the initial stimulative effects were more than offset by the economic drag of a burgeoning public sector. America was not Argentina, but by late in Bush's tenure it was clear that the alternative to becoming Argentina was to raise taxes painfully or cut benefits painfully or, more likely, do both. Voters felt angry and betrayed.
Can't say we didn't warn them way back in 2004, right? But no one ever listens to us.
More from Rauch: Medicare costs soared, resulting in price controls - forcing pharmaceutical innovation to Asia. NCLB did not result in an increase in school quality, as states learned to design tests and standards that imposed no pain. In 2007, Congress passed a national curriculum.
The Republican coalition, united behind Bush in his days of early success, splintered and then fractured as his fortunes waned. The Reagan-Goldwater wing abhorred the centralization and carefree spending; business deplored the fiscal crisis and price controls; hawks were dispirited by the country's inward turn. Weary voters grew nostalgic for the Clinton era, with its prosperity and moderation. They wanted a change. In the Democratic landslide of 2008, they got it. The window for a Republican political alignment, open when Bush took office, had closed, probably for a generation.
Here's hoping that we forestall this disaster by kicking the guy out in 2004.
...Bush, like Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, had aimed high and achieved much. Buth, like them, he had let his impatience and impetuousness get the better of him. He was energetic and assertive, admirably so, but, like more than a few politicians before him, he mistook boldness for sustainability. He pushed the system and the public too hard. He had campaigned originally as a 'humble' man, and in the end humility was forced upon him.
Let's hope sooner rather than later, ok?