The Tragedy of George W. Bush and the Origins of Trumpism
Donald Trump is one of the longest lasting wounds that Osama Bin Laden inflicted on America
It would seem that my last substack was not successful in swinging the electorate against Donald Trump. I don't have any post-mortem thoughts to offer on the Harris campaign. After the 2020 election the chattering class was a buzz with theories that purported to identify the keys to Biden's victory. In the book The Bitter End, a group of political scientists subjected each of these theories to rigorous empirical investigation and concluded that they were all wrong. I’m skeptical that we are ever in a good position right after an election to know exactly what happened, so I'll hold off on my grand narrative of the 2024 election, other than to say that both Democrats and Republicans will likely over read and misread its significance. Trumpists will imagine that they have a greater mandate from the electorate than they do, and Democrats will fear that the Trumpists are right.
However, given that the country has seen fit to inflict Donald Trump on us for another four years, I'm going to inflict on you my take on the origin story of Trumpism. Unlike many a progressive chest thumper, I don't think that Trump is some diabolical incarnation of all of America's original sins going back to 1619. Rather, I think that the origin of Trumpism is best traced back to 2000.
Ronald Reagan represented the triumph of a fusion of free market revolt against the failure of the New Deal state in the 1970s, unapologetic anticommunism, and a cultural conservatism that was a mixture of concerns about crime, the breakdown of family structures, and on its nastier fringes lingering resentments left over from the Civil Rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s. By 2000, this conservative fusionism was a victim of its own success. The Soviet Union was defeated, the mighty liberal establishment that had ridden its chariots in triumph over the political corpse of Richard Nixon had been routed in three crushing electoral defeats – 1980, 1984, and 1988 – and under Clinton the Democratic Party basically made its peace with Reagan’s victory by accepting many of the core insights of fusion conservatism, albeit in a softened and modified form. By the end of the 1990s, the GOP seemed reduced to impotent rage at Clinton's popularity and nostalgia for the glory days of the Gipper.
Enter, George W. Bush. In place of nostalgia for the glory days of the 1980s, Bush offered a new version of conservatism largely focused on a domestic agenda. This was to be the Compassionate Conservatism he offered as a successor to zombie Reaganism. He would retain a commitment to lightly regulated markets and low taxes but in place of the harder edged culture wars of the 1990s, he proposed channeling the energies of the religious right into civil society projects by giving government subsidies and benefits to private organizations providing education and social services, including religious institutions. Throughout his presidency, illegal immigration increased, reaching an all time high in 2007, but his stance was moderate, a mixture of enforcement, better avenues for legal immigrants, and a path to citizenship for illegal residents with permanent roots in the United States. He was also the only president in recent history to make a serious effort at entitlement reform that if successful would have caused some short run pain but put America on a much better long term fiscal footing.
Progressives love to hate on George W. Bush, but I think that they are foolish if they fail to recognize how much better our country would have been had Bush's effort to remake American conservatism been successful. The social energies of religious conservatives could have flowed into civil society. Progressives would have disliked Jesus in the voucher-supported Christian schools pedagogically obsessed by the trivium. They would have grumbled mightily about Chilean-style savings accounts for Social Security. They would have been very upset that the nuns running federally subsidized centers for single mothers held Catholic positions on abortion and birth control. But compared to a world of Christian nationalism, child separation at the border, and the personality cult at MAGA rallies, Bush's version of conservatism looks pretty damn good to me. (And I was always uncomfortable tying civil society in general and religious institutions in particular to government funding.)
Maybe Bush's project was always doomed. There were many conservatives who were skeptical and liberals were always going to oppose it. We will never know, because on September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden changed everything. Bush, elected on a domestic agenda, spent the rest of his presidency focused on foreign policy and national security. To his credit, there were no more spectacular terrorist attacks on American soil. But there was an invasion of Afghanistan, beginning the longest war in American history. There was a disastrous Wilsonian adventure in Iraq. There was a dirty global war against terror with rendition, "enhanced interrogation,” and Gitmo. Bush's eight years in office ended with the 2009 Financial Crisis and massive, rage-inducing bailouts for Detroit and Wall Street. Compassionate Conservatism was not just dead. It was buried and completely forgotten beneath the bloody wreckage of the Bush Administration.
The failure of George W. Bush had massive implications for the Republican Party and American politics. First, it utterly discredited the Republican establishment represented by Bush. As the fierce patriotic anger in the wake of 9/11 and the partisan reflex to defend your party in the White House from partisan attacks faded, a large portion of Republican voters, especially primary voters, decided that the most important enemies they needed to defeat were the Republican politicians who had led them into the morass. They hated Obama, they hated Jon Stewert and the rest of the celebrity sneer-industrial-complex, but they really hated RINOs. The irony was that the "real conservatism” that the RINOs were betraying was incredibly diffuse. By 2016 Republicans still hadn't coalesced around a successor to Reaganism. Neither McCain nor Romney had the charisma or vision to unite Republicans around a shared vision of conservatism. This was the ideological vacuum into which Trump moved.
In a two party system, each coalition contains crazy and extreme elements. In a healthy party, the leadership will give just enough to the crazies to keep them on side but otherwise will keep them on the margins. Reaganism, for example, successfully did this with the remnants of the John Birch Society wing of anti-communism. Democrats today struggle to do this with the illiberal wing of progressivism and the more extreme forms of wokery. In a world where technology, the primary system, and campaign finance laws have hobbled parties as institutions, it's hard. The discredited and intellectually exhausted elite of the Republican Party was unable to do this in 2016. The failure of the Bush project meant that there hadn't been an updated, successful and widely accepted vision of conservatism around which to organize the Republican Party since 1980. Party elites had nothing compelling around which to rally the party and thus little influence on it.
Trump did three things. First, he capitalized on the energy of the crazies within the GOP who had been marginalized, albeit unsuccessfully by the exhausted party leadership. Think of Trump and the birthers. Used to the cold shoulder from figures like Bush, McCain, or Romney, these folks were energized by Trump's embrace and the proximity to power his victory would give them. Second, Trump's brand of nationalism, protectionism, and isolationism provided the seed for a new, populist ideology. Third – and by far the most important – Trump was obviously a fearsomely destructive force, one that was happy to aim itself against a conservative establishment that a critical mass of primary voters hated as the feckless architects of failed wars, crony capitalism, and political defeat. Trump's crass indifference to manners, morals, and institutions far from being a fault was a feature. Chaos and destruction in some sense was the point.
In a more cohesive Republican Party, one with a dynamic new version of conservatism at its heart, Donald Trump would not have been possible. This was the Republican Party George Bush was trying to create in 2001 when Bin Laden shattered the project of Compassionate Conservatism. There is thus a sense in which Trump is indirectly one of the deepest wounds that Al Qaeda managed to inflict upon America.
Until next time,
Nate
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