Washington – Will the tea party sell out for a mess of pottage in the form of a ban on earmarks?
That’s one possibility. But another is that this embrace of a purely symbolic approach to deficit reduction is a sign that the tea party’s central goals may lie elsewhere — in an effort to push the Republican Party away from those aspects of George W. Bush’s legacy that tried to steer the conservative movement in a new direction. The real point may be to get the GOP to say goodbye to the idea of a compassionate conservatism and to Bush’s peculiar but real brand of multiculturalism.
It was entertaining to watch Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reluctantly capitulate to the tea party by supporting a two-year ban on requests for earmarks from his chamber’s Republicans.
McConnell knows perfectly well that ending earmarks will transfer more authority over spending to the executive branch while saving little, if any, money. Earmarks, after all, are nothing more than a legislative gimmick empowering individual senators and representatives to direct pieces of federal largesse toward their favorite projects.
The tea party talks a lot about “constitutionalism,” yet this move flies in the face of the Constitution’s clear preference for congressional control over spending. It’s odd to see so much energy devoted to securing a decision that actually gives more power to President Obama, the politician who inspires so much loathing in the tea party.
But here’s a heretical thought: For many who have rallied to the tea party, the spending issue may be secondary. In the course of researching a paper on religion and the 2010 elections that my Brookings Institution colleague William Galston and I published on Wednesday, I ran across a remarkable essay by Gary Gerstle, a Vanderbilt University historian, in which he argues that Bush’s unique contribution to conservatism was the embrace of a “multiculturalism of the godly.”
Published in “The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment” (Princeton, 2010), the essay sees Bush as attempting to offer “groups of minority voters reason to rethink their traditional hostility to the GOP.”
Gerstle notes that on “questions of immigration and diversity, Bush was worlds apart from Patrick Buchanan and the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party.” Bush “was comfortable with diversity, bilingualism, and cultural pluralism, as long as members of America’s ethnic and racial subcultures shared his patriotism, religious faith, and political conservatism.”
It is notable, Gerstle adds, that at “a time in which the United States was at war and Europe was exploding with tension and violence over Islam, Bush played a positive role in keeping interethnic and interracial relations in the United States relatively calm.”
Christopher Caldwell, a columnist for The Financial Times, was one of the first political writers to pick up on the significance of Gerstle’s essay. Caldwell, an American conservative, used it to critique Bush’s multicultural and compassion agenda and to explain the tea party’s rise. Intriguingly, he suggests that “many of the tea party’s gripes about President Barack Obama can also be laid at the door of Mr. Bush.”
For example, the main effect of Bush’s faith-based initiative, in Caldwell’s view, was to funnel “a lot of federal money to urban welfare and substance abuse programs.” The No Child Left Behind Act, which “meant to improve educational outcomes for minorities, did so at the price of centralizing authority in Washington.” And of course, there was Bush’s 2007 immigration reform proposal, “the clearest sign that he was losing the ear of his party.”
I don’t share Caldwell’s substantive take on these issues — in particular, the problem with Bush’s domestic compassion agenda was how little money he put behind it — but the column is a shrewd reflection on some of the central sources of tea party discontent.
For liberals, the publication of Bush’s memoirs has largely been an occasion for revisiting all the areas in which they rate his presidency a catastrophic failure: the rush to war in Iraq, torture, tax cuts for the rich, the response to Hurricane Katrina. It’s hard for liberals (believe me, I know) to fathom that there are any parts of the Bush legacy we might miss.
But imagine if the main result of the tea party is a “correction” of the Bush creed involving a move away from its most open and tolerant features and a rebellion against even the idea that compassion is a legitimate object of public policy. A conservatism that abandons the redeeming side of Bushism will not be an improvement on the old model.
E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We’re presently working to find 1500 new monthly donors to Truthout before the end of the year.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy