The Right Can't Hide
After reading Jonathan Chait’s terrific piece [sub req.] about the heroic efforts in conservative circles to disassociate themselves from the Bush presidency, I clicked over to Josh Marshall’s item noting that dedicated Bolton supporter Randall Fort has just been tapped to take over the only intelligence shop in the government that got it right about Iraq’s lack of WMD. The connection between the two stories is obvious: the entire executive branch under Bush has been populated not only at the highest levels but also several layers down by card-carrying right-wing ideologues. In picking Fort to take over INR at State, Bush is sabotaging a previously effective agency just as he did when he tapped Joe Allbaugh and Brownie to run FEMA, John Graham to be king at OIRA (where he bollixed up the regulatory process), the sundry Barnum & Bailey rejects in the White House policy office, etc. The New Republic’s hackocracy roster, which really just scrapes the surface, is filled with fervent wingers.
For that matter, Congress has been in the hands of folks who learned everything they know about government policy from reading the National Review, attending Heritage Foundation workshops, and parroting soundbites provided by Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh. If Bush is some sort of rogue liberal – a laughable idea that Chait demolishes – what about all the other proud conservatives who have been doing their thing to the country the past five years? This is what government run by people who proudly call themselves conservative looks like. Their failure is the failure of conservatism. Period.
The TNR link is to a restricted article.
The thing abut putting ideologues or incompetents in charge of departments that have to deal with the real world is that the only ones who suffer are us. We are mired down in Iraq because of invalid assumptions. We have a destroyed New Orleans for the same reasons.
The rest of the world is not hampered by our delusions. We will just continue to fall further behind in terms of our ability to compete in the world. Are all the neo-cons planning to move to Switzerland when the US economy collapses?
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
June 13, 2006 10:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, rdf, now noted in the text. (That's highly annoying because it's really good -- yet another TNR outrage!). --Greg
June 13, 2006 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
just fwiw, i don't regard most of these people as "conservative," although of course that's what they call themselves. i regard them as right-wingers; no one who actually takes authentic conservatism seriously (a pretty small number of people when you get right down to it!) would recognize the crap these people peddle as anything but junk.
June 13, 2006 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know how to fix Congress, but I think it would be a very good thing for America if the next President--from whichever party--did a "reset from save" of the federal government, the way you do in a video game.
Just pull out a complete federal government table of organization from, say, 1999, lay it on a football field next to one from 2008, and have the new President's staffers run around with cell phones, calling all the new guys and firing 'em, and all the old guys and offering them their old jobs back.
Then, and only then, should the new guy start with a transition plan. You know, just pretend you're taking over from competent folks and transition like it's 1999.
I'm telling, you, if you don't reset from save, it's gonna take years to ferret these incompetents out. They're gonna cement in like barnacles. While this idea is obviously insane, I actually think it might be preferable to the alternative, which is gradually moving these idiots out. Which is pretty terrifying, when you think about it.
June 13, 2006 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nietzsche has a 'take' on this sort of thing that goes something like:
In corrupt societies officials knowingly sacrifice the future for the present. Not even the beneficiaries of corruption are naive enough to believe their practices can be sustained. In this atmosphere, any attempt to preserve the unsustainable present entails knowingly ignoring the facts at hand. Their refusal to admit the obvious is rightly interpreted as their last remaining virtue: loyalty.
A rough paraphrase, but doesn't it neatly sum up the nihilist right punditocracy? They've turned a blind eye to the obvious, taken every opportunity to muddy the waters (at best) and if it comes down to it, they go ahead and lie like whores out loyalty to Der Furher.
If even the loyalty is gone, their pockets are empty and the cupboards are bare.
June 13, 2006 11:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Reagan famously stated that "government is the problem" and now Bush the Lesser has set out to make it so. Why does he hate our system of government enough to destroy it?
June 13, 2006 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Their failure is the failure of conservatism."
Maybe so - insofar as it's obvious the triumph of liberalism isn't anywhere near the cause.
June 13, 2006 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
just fwiw, i don't regard most of these people as "conservative" . . .. So, what do you think it is worth, just out of curiosity?
June 13, 2006 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . i don't regard most of these people as "conservative," . . . . howard
Via Crooked Timber, this New Yorker article about Peter Viereck, the intellectual who invented the idea of new conservatism.
After watching their response to McCarthy and Buckley's organizing efforts, Viereck had the number of these so-called Conservatives:
"In 1962, he published an attack on conservatives in The New Republic, titled “The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong,” in which he depicted a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big-business leaders, united in their loathing for the cosmopolitan élites on the nation’s coasts."
That Viereck should have gotten it so right so long ago suggests we should be reading him more often today.
June 13, 2006 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
When I daydream about being President (which I don't do that often BTW), I often think that my first bureaucratic act would be to hire a crack research team to find every Bush administrative change, every Bush political appointee, and every Bush regulatory change, and bring them to me in a "crisply written three page memo." all of the above would be reversed, fired or struck from the Federal Register.
So there are more than a few of us who are a little crazy after all these Bush years, theora.
June 13, 2006 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Plus, it's a theft of an idea that Glenn Greenwald has been blogging about for several months. Check out him and digby for the original formulation of the idea.
June 13, 2006 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
So the conservatives want to blame El Presidente for the sorry state of the conservative movement and throw him overboard. Well it makes sense because Bush is both lame and a duck so why not blame him. The republican representatives who earmarked the shit out of every appropriations bill have to run for re-election...can't blame them for the horrid results of conservative rule.
Conservatives can still scream about activist judges and blame them for the state of our "conservative" government even though 18 out of the last 26 years a republican has been president and appointing the judges.
And as far as the War in Iraq and the GWOT are concerned...those 2 efforts have done more to damage the economic health of our country and the credibility of the US on the world stage. It will probably take decades to recover from the deficits that have been run up by conservative rule.
Bottom line is they have profited from republican rule and continue to want to make sure it is profitable for them. They only have shrunk the part of government that they can't make a profit from...and most of that are programs that assist the American people. And the scapegoat for the failure of the conservative movement has been found so they can claim it wasn't run correctly and it isn't the fault of the conservative theory of governence. When in actuality the whole movement is a failure from top to bottom and it doesn't matter who they try to pin the blame on...
June 13, 2006 1:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Damned shame this isn't workable.
It really will take years to ferret the incompetents out, and even more years to recruit decent candidates to try to ascend the hierarchy to gain expertise and reach positions where they can apply it.
Eight years of getting promoted because you have the proper ideology instead of competency really damages an organization.
June 13, 2006 1:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
In legislating change Burkean Conservatism (see my Viereck post, above) always considers the deeply held customs and sensibilities of the society. On that view Democrats are the conservative party who
-- value economic security
-- seek workplace safety and fairness
-- defend the environment
-- protect the constitutional liberties the people retained, and
-- keep America's world footprint light and supple.
These values are ingrained in the American polity and have been since at least 1932, and it is we Democrats who protect them.
How is it that American discourse fails to recognize that fact? How did Republicans get away with advertising themselves as conservatives?
June 13, 2006 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Because forty years ago, Richard Vigurie took another Democratic idea, direct marketing, and made it a successful tool by which to elect Republicans. Vigurie will tell you that expanding the public relations, developing, recruiting and running local candidates and supporting the whole kit and caboodle with millionaire-subsidized think tanks brought us Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove. Time flies.
It was the New Deal "values ... ingrained in the American polity" that he wanted to dismantle. He reasoned as did Bill Kristol: destroy the Clinton health care reform- keep Democrats from being reelected.
Then you already knew that.
P.S. Good post.
June 13, 2006 2:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
What I perceive as failure could accurately be called a success by these new "conservatives." Liberals regard the last 10 years (let's not forget the Contract with America) of conservative government a failure because liberals are committed to the idea that government can be a force for good in society. These new movement conservatives are convinced that government is illegitimate except where national defense and promotion of particular social morals are concerned. From this point of view, couldn't we say that conservative government has been a limited success? The welfare state hasn't been abolished but its future solvency has been undermined by tax cuts and war. Abortion is still legal and homosexual marriage isn't but social conservatism's network of influence will ensure it remains on the legislative table in the future.
The solution to the problem these (new, movement, ideologically-driven) conservatives represent--and I believe they are a problem, indeed a threat to the republic--is to delegitimize their worldview. Set strategic politics and tactical framing aside for a moment and ask yourself, "what has conservative government done to promote the public interest?" Now imagine a critical media asking the same question every election year. Imagine presidential condidates being asked this question. Expand the question past conservatism's failures. How does liberalism promote the public interest? Adopting this standard would put the American polity back on the right track, leaving ideologues to complain in journals that the world doesn't match up to the ideology they have invested their entire lives in.
June 13, 2006 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
At least one of them has a house in the South of France.
June 13, 2006 2:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . couldn't we say that conservative government has been a limited success?
We could say it, because we know that the corporatist authoritarian state Republicans seek to impose on America is coming closer and closer to being realized.
But Republicans can't say it, because they can't admit that that's their goal and still survive as an American political party.
June 13, 2006 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obsessive, compulsive, damaging behavior. That's conservatism for the last 30 years. DSM-IV would call that diagnosable.
Hope these gyuys have good drug coverage for their therapy.
June 13, 2006 5:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Anrig's opening paragraph deals with Bush appointees who may be extreme right-wingers, ideologues of the first degree, conservatives, neocons...Unfortunately for the health of the nation, they're often incompetent or at least ill-prepared for their jobs. If Paul Oneill, Bush's first Sec of Treasury, is to believed competency takes a back seat to strict loyalty to the Bush/Cheney administration. That same loyalty is required of members of Congress if they want to draw on RNC money to finance their campaigns. Ultimately we have a situation where politics not only drives policy, politics creates it. I doubt that these people sit around and talk about conservative policies let alone the definition of conservatism.
June 15, 2006 11:16 AM | Reply | Permalink