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President George W. Bush is off to an enigmatic start. His team of advisers lacks ideological coherence and incompatible impulses are guiding him on both domestic and foreign policy. Bush talks of faith-based initiatives and the need to build community and civil society, and then goes on to appoint to his cabinet strong proponents of libertarian thinking and deregulation like Gale Norton and Spencer Abraham. He picks Dick Cheney as vice president and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to run the Pentagon, all of whom are hawks and favor the unilateral use of American power, but then selects Condoleeza Rice as National Security Adviser and Colin Powell as Secretary of State, both of whom are far more cautious about sending U.S. troops into combat. What is going on here?
These contradictory signals stem from an emerging ideological split at the heart of the Republican Party. President Bush is struggling to define a new and “compassionate” conservatism. In reality, Bush is returning to a more traditional brand of conservatism, one that has strong roots in America’s past and that stands in stark contrast to the “neoconservatism” of his father’s generation. George W.’s more traditional conservatism harks back to early America in two important respects: it blurs the lines between religion and community and it calls for a selective, constrained approach to America’s engagement in the world.
Until the last few weeks, the communitarian agenda was the provenance of the Democrats. A host of mostly liberal scholars, with the help of the Clinton Administration, has been seeking to reverse the decline of civic engagement in the United States. The restoration of a communal spirit and the nurturing of a new civic responsibility, they have been arguing, are central to social cohesion and the effective functioning of liberal democracy.
In picking up on these themes, Bush is taking on the Republican preference for letting the individual and the market operate in unfettered fashion. He is also adding religion to the equation, presuming that faith-based institutions offer the best way to rebuild social capital. Here, Bush is breaking with many communitarians, but at the same time recovering the link between religion and community that existed during the Republic’s early years. The settlements in the northern colonies relied heavily on Calvinist, Puritan, and Quaker tenets as a foundation for social fabric and communal cohesion.
Bush is orchestrating a similar return to the past in foreign policy. Neoconservative Republicans favor the continuation of U.S. hegemony through, if necessary, unilateral initiative. But Bush seems to have more cautious instincts, again harking back to the conservatism of the founding fathers and their admonition that the new Republic refrain from too much engagement abroad. He is seeking to limit the number and scope of America’s foreign commitments and to concentrate on matters closer to home; his first two foreign visits are with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Mexican President Vicente Fox. Bush seems ready to follow Alexander Hamilton’s counsel in the Federalist Papers that America focus its primary attention on its own hemisphere.
It is way too soon to tell which brand of conservatism will carry the day during the Bush presidency. There are many neoconservatives in the Administration, including the powerful prime minister, Dick Cheney. But Bush’s electoral base in the south and west suggests that a more traditional conservatism will also exercise considerable influence.
The agrarian south and west represent relatively religious regions of the country; they are likely to be comfortable with faith-based initiatives. But the political culture of these regions is also fiercely individualistic and hostile toward government intervention in the private life, be it economic or social. Bush’s exploration of how to use religion to bring together the public and private spheres thus seems more a product of his own religious redemption than an accurate reading of his constituency.
The voters that gave Bush the presidency may be religious and against abortion, but they also the ones that staunchly defend the right to bear arms and the political primacy of the individual citizen and the individual states of the union. This stiff-necked individualism and preoccupation with liberty explain why only 6% of Americans favor school prayers that mention Jesus even though 80% of Americans are Christians.
Bush may well succeed in channeling federal funds to religious organizations. But communitarian philosophies are unlikely to make much of an inroad into a Republican Party and an electoral base that remain deeply protective of individual rights and deeply suspicious of paternalistic institutions, be they political or religious, that seek to impose on Americans a particular notion of what constitutes the good.
Bush’s new conservatism promises to have a much greater impact on foreign policy. The agrarian south and west, while by no means isolationist, are less internationalist and less exposed to the cultural and economic allure of globalization than the coastal west and northeast. During the campaign, Bush tapped directly into the more constrained and populist internationalism of this electoral base, calling for a reduction in America’s foreign commitments, including a withdrawal from the Balkans. Bush himself embodies this electorate, having ventured abroad (apart from Mexico) only three times in his life, despite his family background and many opportunities for foreign travel. Especially in the absence of a galvanizing external threat, Bush’s more traditional conservatism is likely to trump the neoconservative remnants of the Cold War era.
America’s political landscape is changing, and the Republican Party with it. Paradoxically, the most important and immediate implications of Bush’s compassionate conservatism may be felt where they are least intended – in the world beyond America’s borders, which had better prepare for a Republican Party that is turning inward and a United States that is tiring of being the global protector of last resort.
In his farewell address to the nation in 1796, President George Washington noted that America’s “detached and distant situation” provides a natural security. “Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation?” America’s first president asked. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition?” Perhaps prophetic words from one George W. to another.