Is America’s problem really conservatism? Or is it the Bush implementation of that ideology?

Consider this conservative view from Stephen Bainbridge:

It’s time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority?

Meanwhile, Bush continues to insult our intelligence with tripe like this:

“Our troops know that they’re fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. {Ed: Full text here}

“They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war,” he said.

I agree with him. I just don’t think he has gone to the core of the problem.

Knowing the highly political poor-government nastiness that Bush represented here in Texas, I very much opposed his election as President. But at least, I told myself, he had the good sense to bring the very experienced Dick Cheney on board for military and foreign policy substance. I was similarly impressed by his appointment of Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. These were all men who, in spite of being conservative, at least understood good government. Condi Rice also seemed to be such a capable person. At least they all had good resumes.
Something went horribly wrong. At every major turn Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have chosen extreme and wrong-headed directions, while Powell was sideline from day one. Condi had to adapt to stay. They were surrounded and controlled by an organization of ideologues.

Why?

If you try to pin it down purely to conservative-liberal issues, I think you will get the wrong reason. It has been a failure of process more than anything else. The process is focused on adapting to social and geographical changes. If such changes stop, then conservatism is the appropriate way to manage a society. Otherwise, the only reason to stop making adaptive changes it that you are not sure which adaptive change improves things and which attempted changes abandon more important adaptations made in the past.

Conservatives really are people who are (relatively) comfortable with the way things in society are now, and resist changes. In my opinion the changes brought about by science, industrialism and population growth cause blind resistant to change (hard core conservatism) to be the equivalent of social suicide. Society has to change to deal with the new conditions we wake up to each and every day. So I am inclined to go with new ideas and want to see them tried. But at the same time, no human can understand human society (Herbert A. Simon’s Bounded Rationality), so when new ideas are presented and tried, it is really important that the “defenders of the status quo” be there to prevent the new ideas from going over the cliff.

A problem with such defenders of the status quo is that they often build justifications for existing conditions that have no rationality. Racism, segregation, anti-feminism and homophobia are all such blind irrational efforts to keep the past in spite of having no rational justification and being very damaging to our most valuable asset, people. None of those conservative positions has any justification other than fear of change and the conservative fear that if they abandon those values they held to be core to their identities, what supports any other value they are presently ready to go to the mats for? But their fear does not trump the importance of a rational society that provides justice for every member. Legal slavery is gone, legal segregation is gone, and neither is missed They were based on core beliefs some conservatives held and went to the mats over. We have a much better society without them.

But I’ll accept defenders of that status quo as people who force proponents of new ideas to fully justify themselves and implement only those new ideas that have generally positive results. An anchor does nothing to get a ship and its cargo to its destination – except, if judicially applied, to keep it from going on the rocks en route. True conservatives act as a brake on what might otherwise be dangerous whims by people enamored by whatever is new. But the ship and its cargo is much more important than its anchor, The anchor is used to keep the ship from moving, but ships are intended to move. When the anchor becomes a danger to the ship it is cut loose.

The Bush administration is not made up of true conservatives. They are opportunistic extremists. Rove and Bush would have been as happy to run as super extremist liberals if that had been a way to gain power. They fake the values and conservatism as springboards to gaining power. Their only true belief is that they can retain power by catering to their most extreme supporters.

With this view, they work to divide the electorate and isolate their supporters from the rest of society. As long as they get 50.1% of any election they have power, and nothing else matters. Part of this includes making decisions in total secrecy so that opponents will have no power to interfere. This has the side effect that opponents cannot stop totally bad ideas or improve half-baked ones. It also almost totally separates the ideas of governance from the rhetoric and techniques of getting elected. Winning the next election is the only important function of government. There is no consideration of what is happening to society.

I think that society is simply to complex for them to deal with, so there is an assumption that political success will automatically lead to social success. This is analogous to Adam Smith’s idea that for each person to work for their own economic success, the “invisible hand” will provide for an economically successful economy.

The result is that the Bush administration has moved from self-inflicted disaster to self-inflicted disaster. They aren’t doing this as conservatives, but they are doing it in the name of conservatism. The result is that conservatism is going to be tarred with Bush’s incompetence for a generation or longer.

It couldn’t happen to better people. Rove is going to be indicted, then convicted for a number of crimes by Fitzgerald. He will then either go to prison, or Bush will express his rigid and unthinking loyalty to those who are personally loyal to him and pardon him. If Bush pardons him, it will destroy the Republican Party that has tied itself to the Bush electoral successes. Either the pardon or Rove imprisonment is fine with me. The outcome will prove that there is some justice in the world.

The remaining problem is the question of whether the Democratic Party can learn to move into the modern world and do a decent job of regaining power and using it intelligently. But that is another discussion.

[Thanks to Kevin Drumn for directing me to Stephan Bainbridge’s comments.]