Integrity In Republicanism Watch
Ed Morrisey, riffing on Peggy Noonan, again demonstrating that the Republican rank and file aren’t all devoid of some sense of intellectual integrity.
Posted by Brad @ 6:20 pm on March 17th 2007
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You know, I’ve never bought into the idea that Republicans are giving Bush a free pass, generally. As far as I can tell, the people who’ve backed him on matters of this sort are people who believe he’s right–I haven’t seen the Andrew Sullivans or Ed Morriseys or Bill Buckleys or George Wills of the world biting their tongue out of misplaced loyalty to the great leader.
Do you disagree? It seems like you post a lot about “integrity,” as if the party in general was engaged in some mass sacrifice of its core principles for the sake of political expediency. One can be WRONG without lacking integrity, surely?
Comment by Rojas — 3/17/2007 @ 8:42 pm
You are picking a select bunch there, it seems to me. Will and Buckley almost delight in spreading the criticism around, and Sullivan isn’t a Republican at all; Morrissey I don’t know enough about. Will, Buckley and Sully would be better described as ‘conservatives’, of some variety, than as Republicans, precisely because they don’t identify with the party.
I think that the worm is turning somewhat, too. I would say that it really started with Miers, although there were other events, like Schiavo, that were pretty important.
Comment by Adam — 3/17/2007 @ 9:48 pm
I think that George Will and Bill Buckley would be quite, quite suprised at your assertion that they aren’t Republicans.
I could just as easily have given five different names. They’re prominent examples of a broader trend. There’s been significant internal criticism of Bush, issue-by-issue, AT LEAST since his imposition of steel tariffs in 2002.
Comment by Rojas — 3/17/2007 @ 9:52 pm
I think that Will, certainly, thinks of himself as a conservative and not a republican; certainly that’s the impression I get from reading his columns (and I read, I would say, every one). Buckley is a different fish, but compared to some of the current NR crop I would say that he is less in the party than running parallel to it. Both of them, I’d say, have an ideological position that is closer to Republicanism, but to both of them, their ideological position is waaaaaay more important than their party identification. I think that there are a lot of others (such as Hugh Hewitt, although he’s a pretty extreme case) who are more clearly Republican.
Steel tarriffs got a “well, it’s wrong, but he’s our guy” sort of response, I thought at the time.
The big issue, that the republican faithful seemed to me to largely ignore until Miers, was the one of competence.
Comment by Adam — 3/18/2007 @ 7:59 am
It seems like you post a lot about “integrity,” as if the party in general was engaged in some mass sacrifice of its core principles for the sake of political expediency.
Well, yes. That’s more or less EXACTLY my position.
The situation has gotten significantly better in the last say two years. It’s not a scientific theory, mind, where a single counter-example proves it wrong. I’m aware there were any number of issues on which Bush and Republicans have disagreed in the past–Medicare, steel tariffs, Harriet Miers, a few others. But those were all relatively peripheral issues to the broader agenda, by and large (Medicare being an exception, but even then I think it’s fair to say that conservative criticism of it, at the time, was outside the mainstream of Republican thought).
If you want to take a look at the really rather remarkable holding-of-the-coalition on the big issues of the Bush presidency–torture, preemptive war, deficit spending, nationalization of social issues, domestic surveillance, civil liberties/police state infrastructure, imperial executive, entitlement spending/reform, rule of law, constitutional liberalism/activism, power and authority of Congress, etc etc–I think you’ll find, if you made say a Top Ten, both that the vast majority of Republican thinkers have toed the Bush line to a pretty significant degree AND in so doing reneged (with varying degrees of savvy) on principles that they themselves argued for within the last decade. Do you disagree with that? That’s certainly true for the examples you mentioned; to me it’s more or less undeniable when you generalize it to the party or ideological movement at large.
The question is whether they’ve thrown those principles under the bus due to political expediency or whether the Republican party at large and to a member just fundamentally changed its mind on everything in the last six years. Certainly the latter is possible, and on many issues I’d say probable. But it’s not a strong enough proposition, I’d say, to take at face value either, or to just accept sans skepticism.
And, of course, for every Ed Morrissey example I posted here, there’s another to contrast it with, even today. Thankfully, mostly because they got smacked in the face with a shovel electorally last go-around, the shine has come off Bush’s Republicanism, and disagreements are more common and widespread. But that doesn’t rewrite history, either (and I’m not sure what it says about integrity that they start being willing to disagree more only when they’re also feeling the sting at the ballot box more).
Oh, and finally, you’re cherry picking examples, of course, but even the ones you picked did indeed “bite their tongues out of misplaced loyalty” at rather key times. For one quickie example, ask Andrew Sullivan what the deal was with his politics circa 2003, and what he thinks his motives were now. And he represents probably a LESS pernicious example of party-lining than the other three have at various points, but even he now admits he was all too willing to forego intellectual inquiry in the face of fear, anger, emotive jingoism, and unearned faith in the competence and integrity of the White House and her supporters. Ask Sully if he believes his cheerleading of the administration in 2003 was a result of “intellectual integrity”, or something else. I don’t expect you’ll get as straightforward an admission from Will, Buckley, or guys like Morrissey (at least not yet; give it another five years), but I also don’t believe their experiences were that far off.
Comment by Brad — 3/18/2007 @ 5:18 pm