Is Bush really a right-wing genius?

A reader argues that President Bush, despite all appearances that he is lost in a liberal/neoconservative haze, is actually pursuing a hidden, almost superhumanly brilliant hard-line conservative strategy with regard to both Muslim democratization and U.S. immigration. I reply to him below. His letter is quite long, and if it’s more than you want to take in at first, you could jump to the beginning of my reply, where I summarize his thesis.

Dear Mr. Auster:

I’ve spent a great deal of time of late cycling through the websites of the loyal opposition. You, Robert Locke, Steve Sailer, and others have provided inspired analysis and original thinking on the issues of the day. I hope you all keep up the good work.

Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that there is lacking a realpolitik element in your analysis, especially in your criticisms of Bush. By hewing too closely and taking too literally the political pronouncements of the administration, I believe that you are missing the larger strategy employed by Bush, his advisors and the Republican Party in general. More importantly, I believe you are missing how the Bush administration is transitioning the Republicans into eventually making manifest the policy proposals you and others on the disaffected Right want.

Consider Iraq. Yes, it is probably true that the democracy project will fail, given the culture and tradition of the Islamic world (everything from that damned religion to “cousin marriage”). Is the purpose, however, of bringing democracy to Iraq really about bringing democracy to Iraq? Maybe just maybe, this project is a carefully orchestrated campaign to outmaneuver the Democrats by discrediting many of their policies.

Bear with me.

Any successful president (Democrat or Republican) has to straddle the political spectrum to maintain support for his policies, at least on some level. They have to take care of their base, hold the squishy center, and parry their hard-line opponents. Democrat presidents over the last thirty years and for the foreseeable future have settled on “appeasement and diplomacy” as their primary solution to all international crises. Why? The Democrat base is composed of Henry Wallace/George McGovern/Eugene McCarthy/”War is not the Answer” Leftists who are all suspicious of anything the US government does in the interests of its own people. The sheer ineffectiveness of A & D, therefore, is appealing to these people so the Democrat president is guaranteed to get their vote. The squishy center, school-marmed by an effeminized educational system that insists on resolving disputes with “words not fists”, can be duped into believing that A & D is a plausible solution to international crises. After all, the nice teachers said so. The trick is to parry a Right-wing that sees through this nonsense. To prevent the squishy center from being convinced by the Right, the Democrat insists that A & D should be tried because “we could always go to war in the future”. Of course, such a future never comes (unless they are wars not fought for American interests). Nevertheless, the majority of people can buy this and the Right-wing argument is effectively neutered.

9/11 allowed the Republicans to alter this formula. The Republican base regards war as a solution to many problems, so they were satisfied with boots on the ground in Afghanistan, the squishy center was appeased by Bush’s pantomime at the UN, and the Left was rendered useless because of 9/11. The trick was to continue this pattern. A military presence in the Middle East is obviously useful because it focuses jihadi attention on our heavily armed soldiers instead of our civilians but how to rationalize this as a permanent policy? Simple…insist that freedom is being brought to the people of the Middle East. The key point is not whether freedom is actually brought. The key point is that it is a noble endeavor that resonates well with the average American’s image of himself, including the soldiers volunteering for service. Simply put, invading Iraq was and always will be about us. The lies being told by the Bush administration and others regarding Islam are and always will be about maintaining an image of ourselves.

Few really appreciate how ingenious this strategy is. The Left is effectively neutered, reduced to incoherent babbling about Halliburton, “Big Oil” and “Imperialism” (Note: Empires do not take losses out of proportion to their power and it is effectively impossible to argue against freedom). No new terrorist attacks have occurred on US soil since 9/11, casting a glow on the Bush administration regardless of the correlation/causality problem. And a national security issue is permanently implanted that fits squarely with Republican ideology in a way the Democrats can never match.

But it gets better. Simply put, the Right is not dependent on whether or not democracy takes root in the Middle East. This is a consequence of Republican policy being based on puffing-up America’s image of itself, a “feel-goodism” carried by the belief that thinking the best of others is a mark of a good human being. Being naïve is not the same thing as being bad, so the Right will be mostly exonerated if democracy fails. Hey, they tried with the most noble of intentions, with the most charitable interpretations of the enemy, with the greatest benefit of the doubt. They were slapped back. Now the Republicans and Americans can shed their naiveté toward alien people in good conscience.

If democracy fails it will simply mean that benevolent nation-building (and the circus of lies justifying it) is discredited as a viable policy option. Once nation-building falls apart, and hard-heartedness slowly begins to set in, harder-line Right-wing views will begin to migrate toward the center aided and abetted by…you guessed it…America’s immigration problem.

The Republican lack of interest in handling immigration is based on more than cheap labor or punishing Democrat constituencies like blacks and unions. Its lack of engagement fuels the security threat that only a Republican stewardship can handle. Few, again, appreciate how ingenious this strategy is. The Democrats backed themselves into a corner with their “fringe-group” ideology. So enamored are the Democrats with minority groups that they have deprived themselves of the rhetoric or ideology to handle the problems immigration causes. They are, instead, drawn to defend immigration, either through benign indifference or enthusiastic support. This splinters the Democratic Party, as both blacks and Hispanics become more militant (the former to preserve their dwindling influence; the latter exercising their increasing influence), alarming whites and triggering white flight out of the Democratic Party. Add rapes, murders, robberies and the occasional subway/bus bombing (or worse) in predominantly blue-state cities, and much Democrat conventional wisdom, including appeasement and diplomacy, goes out the window. Who is available to take up the slack but other Republicans with a history of fighting exactly these problems?

Far from being a closet liberal or a neo-con fool, Bush and his buddies are destroying their political enemies, engineering problems that other “big tent” Republicans can use in future campaigns, and defending such actions under rhetoric that is almost impossible to counter. They’ve learned well from the Democrats. Not only is the health of the Republican Party and Conservative Movement is assured, but the hard-Right will get its deportations, immigration restrictions and maybe even resurgence in Western culture.

I understand that this is not the most edifying picture of politics. Realizing that a major political party has to make things worse to make things better… has to almost break a nation to rebuild it… is strong medicine to stomach. Yet, what other choice is there? We live in a fundamentally dishonest and dishonorable age where there is a difference between being right and being effective.

My reply:

Dear Mr. _____,

That’s quite an essay. At the heart of it are two parallel assertions: (1) that pursuing the chimera of spreading democracy discredits that agenda without discrediting (in the eyes of the squishy center) the Republicans/conservatives who are pursuing it, thus enabling the Republicans/conservatives to adopt a more hard-line approach to our Muslim enemies; and (2) that pursuing an open borders policy discredits that policy without discrediting (in the eyes of the squishy center) the Republicans/conservatives who are pursuing it, thus enabling the Republicans/conservatives to adopt a more hard-line approach to immigration.

Is it conceivable that things may work out the way you describe? Yes, just as the catastrophe of the Miers nomination led to the much better result of the Alito nomination. But is it conceivable that Bush and his team are pursuing this as a conscious policy? Absurd. In fact, your logic only works if this is NOT a conscious Bush plan but something happening by accident or providence.

We already have previous instances of theories such as yours regarding Bush’s Machiavellian brilliance: the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Consider what many of Bush’s defenders said about his insane appeasement and diplomacy policy in the Mideast, which he re-embarked on AFTER making his seeming historic radical restatement in June 2002 that the U.S. would not deal with the Palestinians any more or help them gain a state until they ended and dismantled terrorism and stopped incitements against Israel. As they watched Bush engaging in yet more appeasement and diplomacy toward the Palestinians (which was literally unbelievable, considering all the terrible lessons that had already been learned about such A&D), these Bush-is-a-genius people said that this was part of a brilliantly devised Bush maneuver to prove once and for all that the Palestinians would never accept Israel on any terms, and that this would then allow Bush to drop the peace process and free the Israelis to handle the situation as they needed to handle it.

But this consummation never occurred. The worse the Palestinians have continued to behave, the more appeasement and diplomacy Bush and Rice engaged in. It became horribly evident that they were not engaged in a ploy, but pursuing something they really believed in .

Given that Bush and his team are still pushing Israel to make further concessions to the Palestinians at this point, given that they are speaking of recognizing Hezbollah and Hamas as part of democratically elected governments, the inescapable conclusion is that they are indeed deluded, hyper-Wilsonian, appeasement-and-diplomacy liberals. Given this fact, it is inconceivable that they have any plan in mind resembling what you have laid out.

But, as I said, using the Miers affair as a paradigm, it is conceivable that things may work out the way you describe, though not as the result of any conscious Bush plan. And this leads to a further speculation. There has always been something strange and impenetrable about Bush. People have the greatest difficulty figuring out what he’s really up to, and, with his reliance on prayer and instinct, and his limited communication skills, he gives the impression of being motivated by factors that he does not understand and cannot articulate. So here’s my speculation. Maybe in the providence of things Bush is a kind of Idiot of God, who is being led, without his conscious participation, to engage in these irrational and insane policies, so as inadvertently to reach, over the long run, the beneficent and realistic result you describe. I’m not saying I believe this speculation. But given the utter strangeness of this president, and in particular the positive way the horrendous Miers nomination has worked out, it does not seem impossible.

Thanks for writing. It was most interesting.

Regards,
Lawrence Auster

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2005 10:33 AM | Send