At Some Point, Reality Has Its Day

Sometimes in my dark moments, I think [George W. Bush] is "The Manchurian Candidate" designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in.

That's a quote from David Brooks on Meet the Press back in 2006. I'll go out on a limb and bet that Brooks' "dark moments" have grown more frequent and acute over the last two years. Indeed, if today's column is any indication, he appears to be in the grips of a rather intense episode right now.

While reflecting on yesterday's events, I came across a post I wrote two years (to a much smaller readership). It seems particularly relevant at the moment, so I thought I'd reprint an extended excerpt from it here. Feel free to follow the link to read the whole thing. The title of the post was "At Some Point, Reality Has Its Day":

Those words were spoken by Al Gore in an interview published this week by Newsweek. It was a passing comment, a digression from Gore's larger point about the unwillingness of our current Republican leadership to acknowledge the danger posed by global warming. He observed that "the temptation to reject the truth and try to manufacture your own reality is what got us into Iraq--it's what got us into these deficits. At some point, reality has its day."

I think Gore's comment perfectly captures the point in American political history where we find ourselves at the moment. The modern Republican party is a movement built upon a collection of ideas dreamed up by people far removed from the realities of actual governance. These half-formed policies--slogans really--were borne out of anger and powerlessness, not empiricism and dispassionate inquiry. They were not designed to be effective or workable, but rather to be consistent with pre-existing ideologies and, of course, easy to sell. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a governing philosophy that sounds great in the abstract, but is incoherent and ill-suited to the task of actually governing. For the last six years, our entire federal government has been under the control of adherents of this philosophy, and, predictably, reality is about to have its day.

The father of the modern Republican party was Barry Goldwater. Though he was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Goldwater's particular brand of conservatism really struck a chord among those who were fed up with the prevailing liberal governing philosophy, thereby spawning a whole generation of followers. This movement was defined by a hostility toward taxes and government spending and a reflexively bellicose foreign policy.

Many people point to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as marking the ascendancy of modern Goldwater Republicanism. This is true in a sense. Reagan's election did mark the ascendancy of Goldwaterism as the guiding political philosophy of the GOP. But Reagan had to contend with a Democratic Congress which greatly limited his ability to implement his party's platform. The same was true in the 1990s, only in reverse. The constant threat of a Clinton veto kept the Republican-controlled Congress at bay. For those two decades, the modern GOP was able to campaign on a largely untested set of principles and policies.

But all that changed in 2000 when George W. Bush took office. For the first time, the modern GOP controlled both chambers of Congress and the presidency. It was finally time to put Goldwaterism to the test. . . .

Contrary to what many conservatives are now saying, Bush has not abandoned the Reagan/Goldwater legacy. He's just proven how substantively empty that legacy is. Goldwater Republicanism was never a coherent governing philosophy; it was a collection of slogans. George W. Bush is the first president who has really had the opportunity to translate those slogans into actual policy, and it's been an unmitigated disaster.