Andrew Bacevich makes the interesting suggestion that Bush is more cynical than radical. But like Sid, I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive. We should remember that all politics, and all governance, demands some compromise of principles, which can always invite charges of cynicism from those seeking to renounce a failed figurehead who has claimed to represent their ideology. No modern president has governed without some degree opportunism, cynicism, and even selling out (though some do it more than others).

The deviation from core doctrines that politics by its nature requires—even of the most sincere, devout leaders—allows others to distance themselves from bad outcomes by casting these leaders as apostates. Hence, the spectacle of conservatives now abandoning Bush en masse (and I’m referring here not to my interlocutor Mr. Bacevich, but rather to men like those writing in the October Washington Monthly).

They seek to paint Bush as a faux conservative. But their defections only give more credence to the prescient line of Sid’s analysis I quoted in my last post: that “like Trotskyists for whom communism always remained an unfulfilled ideal, conservatives now claim that conservatism has not been tried, and that Bush is a ‘betrayer’ and ‘impostor.’”

In fact, the ruthlessness at the heart of Bush’s radicalism is also at the heart of his cynicism. The two are linked. One of the virtues of “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime” is that Sid illustrates this linkage quite concretely. Reread these columns; the review is eye-opening. To choose almost at random, consider Sid’s December 22, 2005 parsing of Bush’s justifications for his manifestly illegal domestic wiretapping. Sid exposes the radicalism there—the heedlessness of law, the arrogation (and arrogance) of power, the contempt for restraints. And he deftly underscores these tendencies of Bush’s by counterposing the president’s claims of unlimited executive authority with actual language from Supreme Court decisions dating to 1952—as well as by handing his rapier at the end of the column to Tom Paine to conclude the evisceration of Bush’s view of himself as the law incarnate. But while this is radicalism, it is radicalism justified and spun and retailed with cynicism: “President Bush’s explanations … have shifted with every news cycle,” Sid begins the piece, accurately.

I agree with Todd Gitlin that in this administration Bush is the ultimate decider (to use the president’s own term of self-description). Those who imagine Bush an empty vessel and assign all power to second-tier “neocons” are indulging in fantasies—sometimes ugly ones. And I agree with Sid in his last post that “Bush’s temperament is an essential part of the dynamics … [including] [h]is stubbornness, lack of curiosity, shallow reservoir of knowledge, Manichean division of the world, and contempt for ‘nuance.’” But I’m also starting to think that there’s something in the Republican party that instinctively seeks out and elects men who share these and kindred traits. GOP voters, in the main, see the stubbornness as machismo; the lack of curiosity as lack of pretense; the shallow reservoir of knowledge as a deserved rebuke to elites and experts; and the Manichean division of the world and the contempt for nuance as “moral clarity.” Republicans not only like these qualities in Bush, as they did in Ronald Reagan; they also can depend, fairly reliably, on slim majorities of Americans cottoning to these qualities as well come election time—at least until the baleful consequences of these traits reveal themselves in practice, as they’re now doing.

What I’m saying, in short, that Bush’s radicalism is a logical outgrowth of the conservative movement—both its “anything goes” style of politics and its maximalist ideology. We should not imagine that it will end with the Bush presidency.