A Load of Kos

Yesterday, Daily Kos described another chapter in the disintegration of the conservative coalition. This time it is the well-known pundit Kevin Phillips, once a strategist for the Republican Party and author of the famous 'The Emerging Republican Majority', who has turned into a critic of the GOPs apparent departure from conservative principles. To Kos’ credit, he does not confuse this further crack-up of the Republican base with a stroke in the liberal win column. There is no substitute for a well-organized and articulated opposition.

However, Kos sounds a familiar note in echoing Phillip’s criticism:

“It can't be said enough. The modern Republican Party has abandoned all pretenses of conservatism in favor of cult of personality. But those movement conservatists are dinosaurs in an era of Bushbots. They're either old, obsolete, and dying off, or they've been corrupted beyond recognition and are being forced to lawyer up.”

In his comparison between dinosaurs and ‘Bushbots’ Kos is playing to the idea that the Bush loyalists are an clique of ideologues and adventurers, given to risky ventures and unconstrained by the realpolitik that defined conservatism in the past. It is a familiar criticism, leveled by such diverse voices as Francis Fukuyama and Pat Buchanan who believes the neocons “owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft," and that there is "a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.”

First of all, there is nothing to Kos' claim of a contradiction between conservatism and the cult of personality. In fact, the cult of personality is always politically conservative. It speaks either to pre-modern ideas about dignity, honor, and personal integrity as the basis of legitimate rule, or to a rather more twentieth-century, but no less reactionary, politics of plebiscites and charismatic authority.

But more to the point, where does this fascination, or really obsession, with Bush’s supposed anti-conservatism come from? From liberals like Daily Kos, to former neocons to Francis Fukuyama, to conservatives like Phillips and Pat Buchanan, everyone is convinced that Bush’s project of war, deficit spending, and democracy promotion is something closer to revolutionary than conservative. We have suggested that this criticism of Bush is wide of the mark because he is actually more anti-utopian than utopian, but there’s more to the story. Why obsess about the one feature of Bush’s project that is positive? That he is not following some idealized vision of conservatism is neither here nor there (unless you really are a traditionalist). Obsessing about Bush’s lack of conservatism only leads criticism towards an even more pessimistic or ‘realist’ direction, which is hardly the way to direct critical, progressive thinking. Surely what is bad about Bush is not his apparent willingness to demand great sacrifices in the name of democracy and freedom, but that he is actually taking us in the opposite direction.