Guess who says this about Bush: “The president conveys something seigneurial and contemptuous as a campaigner; it is as if the whole contest were beneath him … he kept saying that he ‘cared’ about the economic hardship individual citizens were experiencing, as if his ‘Caring’-his notice-were all the affected people were after. He did not offer substance, as if he didn’t really have to, the implication being that these folks could be swayed with less. He was, as he generally is, snobby-dismissive of his critics. . . So says The Washington Post, which agrees with Buchanan about only one thing: Bush’s grating persona.
But conservatives should not blame Bush’s condescending disconnection from the country on Bush’s Andover-Yale upbringing. A bad attitude is not a necessary result of good schools. The president who engineered the end of the WASP ascendancy grew up cosseted by privilege on a Hudson Valley estate. In winter his parents took him out in a horse-drawn sleigh lined with red velvet and bearing the family crest, a sleigh originally a gift from Czar Aleksandr II to Napoleon III. And when Franklin Roosevelt went from Groton to Harvard, all but two of his classmates went with him. Bush could be better, he just isn’t.
Conservatives should not be social determinists in explaining character, or its lack. But reverse snobbery has recently been all the rage in Republicans’ intramural dustups. In 1980 Reagan came out of his tar-paper shack in Pacific Palisades to beat up Bush who, Reaganites said, was “a clean fingernails Republican. " (Reagan presumably dirtied his nails cutting the brush on his Santa Barbara ranch.) In 1988 Bob Dole ran a more-downtrodden-than-thou campaign against Bush, bragging about his rise from the lower orders in Kansas. This drove Bush to boast that he was a bowling alley kind of guy. Bush in 1988 was the first Republican nominee born to wealth since Taft in 1912. But the emptiness of Bush’s politics is not a necessary result of anything. President (and Chief Justice) William Howard Taft had a fine mind and a fine family. And his grandson, the senator, did not let a Yale education incapacitate him for a life of thoughtful conservatism.
Thirty-two years ago Buchanan was moved by Barry Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Fighting faiths make much of the claims of conscience. Buchanan calls his current insurrection an imperative of conscience, an act of fealty to principle. Well now. Buchanan’s principles did not prevent him from serving six pugnaciously loyal years in Nixon’s White House. Never mind the crime wave there. But Nixon’s administration was the second most liberal administration since the New Deal, second only, and not by much, to Lyndon Johnson’s.
Nixon’s wage-and-price controls constituted the largest peacetime intrusion of government into the economy in American history, surpassing even the dreams of the New Dealers. Nixon saying, “We are all Keynesians now,” had an industrial policy (subsidizing the SST) and he got government into running a railroad (Amtrak). He initiated revenue sharing, which weakened spending restraints at state and local levels. He created the Burger Court which did not overturn any major Warren Court precedent. Its 1973 abortion decision was an act of raw judicial power as sweeping and unconnected with constitutional reasoning as any opinion in the Court’s history. In 1971 in a Charlotte, N.C., case a unanimous Court, with Burger writing the ruling, allowed judges vast latitude to order forced busing to achieve racial balance in schools. Today’s racial spoils system gained momentum from Nixon’s “Philadelphia plan” for minority contractor set-asides in the construction industry.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were born under Nixon. The seeds of today’s deficit explosion were sown in Nixon’s competition with Wilbur Mills, then chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to see who could be most lavish with Social Security. But Buchanan, who considers Bush an apostate from the conservative church still speaks of Nixon as one of the faithful.
The Wall Street Journal’s David Brooks writes that when Bush tries to resemble a Reaganite, he clearly feels he is ideologically slumming and “comes out looking like a French kid trying to do rap music-lots of effort, no effect.” But Bush is where he is because of the Reagan connection, and that means conservatives have a problem.
The conservative National Review says that because Bush is Reagan’s heir “in fact, if not in spirit,” conservatives must take “decisive distinguishing action” lest recent conservatism be retroactively discredited by association with Bush. But some distinctions Buchanan draws are injurious. Against Bush’s lazy, muzzy drift, Buchanan proposes a purposeful march down a descending, crumbling path that the European right took to oblivion decades ago. He blends nationalism with statism, including protectionism against the challenge of change, which he sometimes denounces as “vulture capitalism.” And he, like today’s campus leftists, encourages a crabbed, defensive, irritable definition of America not in terms of shared affirmations of ideas but of a sharpened sense of ethnic identities, some of them preferable to others. (Zulus and Yalies, he suggests, pose severe assimilation problems.)
Caught between the vacuum that is Bush and the resentment that is Buchanan, conservatism faces its worst identity crisis since Goldwater and Reagan, two tough but also generous and amiable Westerners, stepped, almost simultaneously, on stage, smiling.
title: “Vacuum Vs. Resentment” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “William Mckinsey”
Guess who says this about Bush: “The president conveys something seigneurial and contemptuous as a campaigner; it is as if the whole contest were beneath him … he kept saying that he ‘cared’ about the economic hardship individual citizens were experiencing, as if his ‘Caring’-his notice-were all the affected people were after. He did not offer substance, as if he didn’t really have to, the implication being that these folks could be swayed with less. He was, as he generally is, snobby-dismissive of his critics. . . So says The Washington Post, which agrees with Buchanan about only one thing: Bush’s grating persona.
But conservatives should not blame Bush’s condescending disconnection from the country on Bush’s Andover-Yale upbringing. A bad attitude is not a necessary result of good schools. The president who engineered the end of the WASP ascendancy grew up cosseted by privilege on a Hudson Valley estate. In winter his parents took him out in a horse-drawn sleigh lined with red velvet and bearing the family crest, a sleigh originally a gift from Czar Aleksandr II to Napoleon III. And when Franklin Roosevelt went from Groton to Harvard, all but two of his classmates went with him. Bush could be better, he just isn’t.
Conservatives should not be social determinists in explaining character, or its lack. But reverse snobbery has recently been all the rage in Republicans’ intramural dustups. In 1980 Reagan came out of his tar-paper shack in Pacific Palisades to beat up Bush who, Reaganites said, was “a clean fingernails Republican. " (Reagan presumably dirtied his nails cutting the brush on his Santa Barbara ranch.) In 1988 Bob Dole ran a more-downtrodden-than-thou campaign against Bush, bragging about his rise from the lower orders in Kansas. This drove Bush to boast that he was a bowling alley kind of guy. Bush in 1988 was the first Republican nominee born to wealth since Taft in 1912. But the emptiness of Bush’s politics is not a necessary result of anything. President (and Chief Justice) William Howard Taft had a fine mind and a fine family. And his grandson, the senator, did not let a Yale education incapacitate him for a life of thoughtful conservatism.
Thirty-two years ago Buchanan was moved by Barry Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Fighting faiths make much of the claims of conscience. Buchanan calls his current insurrection an imperative of conscience, an act of fealty to principle. Well now. Buchanan’s principles did not prevent him from serving six pugnaciously loyal years in Nixon’s White House. Never mind the crime wave there. But Nixon’s administration was the second most liberal administration since the New Deal, second only, and not by much, to Lyndon Johnson’s.
Nixon’s wage-and-price controls constituted the largest peacetime intrusion of government into the economy in American history, surpassing even the dreams of the New Dealers. Nixon saying, “We are all Keynesians now,” had an industrial policy (subsidizing the SST) and he got government into running a railroad (Amtrak). He initiated revenue sharing, which weakened spending restraints at state and local levels. He created the Burger Court which did not overturn any major Warren Court precedent. Its 1973 abortion decision was an act of raw judicial power as sweeping and unconnected with constitutional reasoning as any opinion in the Court’s history. In 1971 in a Charlotte, N.C., case a unanimous Court, with Burger writing the ruling, allowed judges vast latitude to order forced busing to achieve racial balance in schools. Today’s racial spoils system gained momentum from Nixon’s “Philadelphia plan” for minority contractor set-asides in the construction industry.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were born under Nixon. The seeds of today’s deficit explosion were sown in Nixon’s competition with Wilbur Mills, then chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to see who could be most lavish with Social Security. But Buchanan, who considers Bush an apostate from the conservative church still speaks of Nixon as one of the faithful.
The Wall Street Journal’s David Brooks writes that when Bush tries to resemble a Reaganite, he clearly feels he is ideologically slumming and “comes out looking like a French kid trying to do rap music-lots of effort, no effect.” But Bush is where he is because of the Reagan connection, and that means conservatives have a problem.
The conservative National Review says that because Bush is Reagan’s heir “in fact, if not in spirit,” conservatives must take “decisive distinguishing action” lest recent conservatism be retroactively discredited by association with Bush. But some distinctions Buchanan draws are injurious. Against Bush’s lazy, muzzy drift, Buchanan proposes a purposeful march down a descending, crumbling path that the European right took to oblivion decades ago. He blends nationalism with statism, including protectionism against the challenge of change, which he sometimes denounces as “vulture capitalism.” And he, like today’s campus leftists, encourages a crabbed, defensive, irritable definition of America not in terms of shared affirmations of ideas but of a sharpened sense of ethnic identities, some of them preferable to others. (Zulus and Yalies, he suggests, pose severe assimilation problems.)
Caught between the vacuum that is Bush and the resentment that is Buchanan, conservatism faces its worst identity crisis since Goldwater and Reagan, two tough but also generous and amiable Westerners, stepped, almost simultaneously, on stage, smiling.
