Bush is no Conservative
I provide the following as a description of the current American political landscape:
1. Most Americans don’t have an understanding of our own history and of political ideological terms like Liberal and Conservative in the academic/secular sense.
2. Americans are largely apolitical and, for various reasons, have in recent decades come to belive that the institutional political process is ineffective, unresponsive and inaccessible. Of course, this political apathy has been cultivated by both parties at various times, and for various reasons. However, a cursory glance at recent history would strongly suggest that this ploy has been more effectively used by the Right. Moreover, the point here is that because this apathy is true of a substantial segment of the American public, most of us have come to belive that change is not affected through political institutions nor through collective organization (i.e., marches, public rallies and the occasional civil disobedience).
3. In America, the cult of the individual has been deified to such a degree that the value of collective action is completely ignored. Here’s what I mean, in America it would seem that every notable human accomplishment somehow miraculously sprung from the mind of ONE individual at a given point, and that that individual alone changed the course of things. This, of course, completely ignores the contributions that countless other people make so that that ONE person could accomplish whatever it is that she’s credited with.
4. Taken together: (1) A good portion of Americans tend to be ill-informed on political (not to mention historical and international) matters; (2) Americans have little faith that the political/electoral process is the best way to resolve the nation’s problems to begin with and, too, we lack the social capital (i.e., grassroots community foundations) to organize and effectively engage political institutions; and, finally, (3) since the cult of the individual is inculcated at a young age, we don’t naturally gravitate towards organized groups as a way to solve problems.
Now, I belive that the above condition has created a vacuum wherein a good segment of the American electorate, lacking a firm grounding on historical and secular Conservatism, have imbued one party (i.e., Republican) as the vessel for ALL the social and religious conservative values that they would like to see enforced/adopted in the country at large. What does this mean in practical terms? Well, because in America we have only two viable parties (Democratic and Republican), most people that align themselves with one party or the other have little alternative but to vote for that party or not vote at all. Therefore, since the Republican party has been largely co-opted by a strong and vocal social/religious segment of that party, traditional conservatives (i.e., conservatives in the secular, academic, budgetary and state vs. the individual sense) have been largely marginalized within the Republican party. (As an aside, this is the reason why many “traditional” or true conservatives in the Republican party are predicting a “civil war” within the party after the November elections. Also, this is the reason why some “traditional” or true conservatives have endorsed Mr. Kerry over the Republican candidate, Mr. Bush.) Accordingly, in America, labels like Liberal and Conservative, in the pedestrian sense, have come to signify one’s “social” and religious values, rather than what the two labels are generally understood to mean in the academic/Political Science field.
Moreover, the Bush administration is not conservative, in the “traditional” or true sense of the term, by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, the Bush administration borders on imperial as it has subverted the Constitution and federal law in pursuit of polices that compromise individual rights, and by holding itself above public accounting for its execution of the Iraq war.
