Greenwald posted yesterday on a theme similar to what I wrote about Saturday. My post was prompted by a column by George Will, but segued into a criticism of Andrew Sullivan. The thrust of Greenwald’s post is to take a look at the growing trend within conservatism to repudiate Bush as unconservative. There are some who have even taken to calling Bush a liberal. It’s facetious. The point is, though, that movement conservatives’ distancing themselves from him has nothing to do with Bush’s lack of conservative principle. Greenwald:
What is most glaringly apparent from this entire spectacle is that outside of a handful of honest conservatives too small to merit much discussion [the ones who objected to Bush early on as a radical rather than a "conservative" (and were viciously attacked as heretics, non-conservatives, even liberals)], the right-wing "conservative movement" — which eagerly ignored its own "principles" when Bush was popular and re-discovered them only when it needed to repudiate him — has conclusively demonstrated that its only real "principle" is its own political power.
Power is the only thing that matters to rightists, which are a different kind of cat from the rare principled conservative. Rightism is more a kind of personality disorder than it is a set of
principles. And rightism has been the disease that has infected the
Republican Party for over twenty years now culminating in the current
administration.The crony capitalism and militarism that are at the heart of the big government and big spending of the Reagan and Bush administrations has nothing to do with liberalism and is completely consistent with-right wing politics over the last century in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
In any event, this is a paragraph in Greenwald’s post that Sullivan seems to have missed, because in a post today he focuses on another one:
The media’s function is not merely to pass on self-serving conservative propaganda but to report actual historical fact, to point out when such propaganda deviates from objective truth. The "conservative movement" now desperately trying to depict Bush as an anti-conservative vigorously argued the exact opposite for the last six years. No account of the conservative movement’s chicanery can be remotely accurate without prominently highlighting that fact. George Bush is tied irrevocably around the neck of the right-wing movement because they tied themselves to him when they thought doing so would be politically beneficial.
To the above paragraph by Greenwald Sullivan responds:
What about those of us who complained about spending in 2002? Who backed Kerry in 2004 because of Bush’s unconservative record? Who opposed torture as soon as the evidence emerged? Who dissented from the FMA and Schiavo? Who opposed compassionate conservatism from the start? Who wrote books explaining how Bush was not a conservative? I guess there weren’t many of us in public. Give Bruce Bartlett some props. But our existence is also part of the objective truth of the past six years.
My problem with Sullivan is not that he hasn’t the capacity to recognize what this administration really is, but that his conservatism was an impediment early on to his predicting what it would become. No one was a bigger Bush cheerleader in the beginning, and none a greater disparager of those as "Bush haters" who saw this man with clearer eyes for what he was.
Sullivan is not a complete fool, but he doesn’t seem to understand how power works, and he doesn’t connect the dots when it comes to the irrelevance of his conservative principles when it comes to the way the Republican party operates. His mistake is one that conservatives and center right people have made consistently. They think because someone says something they want to hear, that makes them better fitted to run government. Small government conservatives are among the naivest of the naive. Big government is here to say; the only question is whose interests it will serve. These principled conservatives haven’t caught on to how they have been enablers of rightism even if they are appalled by it. If there are any Sullivan admirers, please defend him and explain why his brand of conservatism has any credibility whatsoever. I just don’t get it.
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