Principled / intellectually-driven conservatism, pragmatism & Bush

I'm a bit late to the scene, so I don't have the full back story. The names I've come to learn are George Will, William Saffire, Buckley. Someone named Fukayama.

There are others of course. Krauthammer (who I *think* is more of an attack dog than a pillar of conservative thought), Barnes, others. These guys are the middle management of conservative thought, so to speak.

The door-to-door salesmen are the O'Reilly's, Limbaugh's and Hannity's of the world. They are particulary dispicable.

My theory of today is this: It's not just the democrats like myself who, when we first saw George B. on stage during the primaries and 2000 election think to ourselves, "this man is a moron." The republicans did as well. I think that we are seeing the intellectual leaders of the conservative movement walk away from Bush. I'm not talking about wholesale retreat, but they are certainly casting stones.

Buckley is calling the Iraq war a failure.

George Will believes that wiretapping shows an out-of-balance executive. (Read the whole thing, because warrantless wire tapping is just an example of a bigger issue).

Francis Fukuyama argues that the Bush doctrine is in shambles. This article is a pay-for link, so here is what I personally found very intersting:

''The End of History,'' in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

This struck a chord for me. I had, for many years, felt that individuals, groups, organizations, coutries, whatever -- those that would argue so strongly against the United States and that for which it stands -- they simply don't realize that we are, in fact, the best place on earth. Come 9/11 and the months and years that have followed and we learn that many of the hijackers had been here in the country for quite some time before they acted. And my thinking had been -- anyone that plans to do such a thing could only act if they didn't know who they would be hurting. But these people did and I had to re-evaluate. Because my thinking along these lines was "Leninist" in the sense that I too felt that 1) liberal democracy is the End State and 2) that there are steps we can take to get us all down that path more quickly and with less pain. I'm not sure sure any more.

Does Bush need a solid intellectual basis to govern? I think so. I hope more than I believe :)

It seems that these people, though late to the game from my perspective, are finally coming to their senses and see truth for what it is. Their ideas, which are at the least interesting and worth debating, are not being carried forth into the world by the current leadership in our country. I think they probably knew it all along, but had no choice but to carry water for these people and hoped they could influence the likes of Bush, Rove, Cheney, Hastert, Frist, Delay, etc. to govern in accordance with their conservative principles. Now that it's more and more obvious that this is not the case, they find that their original instinct, that Bush is a moron, was correct.

Conservative dishonesty, Fred Barnes, social security

Witness his Weekly Standard (of 03/06/2006) article on the weekystandard.com website.
His opening paragraph:

Like few presidents before him, President Bush was poised for a consequential and potentially quite successful second term. It hasn't worked out that way (so far). Bush made one strategic error in 2005, guessing wrongly that the country was adult and serious enough to reform Social Security. Now he faces at least two immediate challenges: immigration and the Dubai ports flap.

Social security reform Bush-style failed because as a nation, we're not "adult and serious enough".

It's not because the serious adults in the nation considered the plan and rejected it.