28 Years of Reagan-Bush
In 1980 I was a graduate student at Stanford University; if fact, I happened to be president of the Political Science graduate students. A couple days after the election of Ronald Reagan, the fellow student I most admired, Gary Chapman, came to me and said, ¡°This was an historic election, we have to do something.¡± Gary and I were on the same wave-length. We were both a bit older than our fellow students and perhaps had tasted a bit more reality than our privileged peers. While I had interrupted my studies to kick around America¡¯s streets as a hippie doing all kinds of things from working in a soup kitchen to packing Christmas toys in a warehouse to preparing citizens¡¯ taxes, Gary had served as a Green Beret in Vietnam and then returned home to resume his education with a new-found determination to understand the source of war and how to lessen its hold of the world¡¯s people.
Gary¡¯s proposal was that the Political Science graduate students should hold a public conference on the Reagan election, pooling our budding skills as political analysts to hold a 1980s version of a teach-in. At that event, Gary made an impassioned plea for us all to understand how historically significant the new philosophy and agenda of the Reagan administration was.
My position was more nuanced. While I agreed with Gary about the intentions of the incoming Reagan administration, I argued that they were far from able yet to set a new course for the nation. I pointed out that the Democrats still controlled Congress, and more importantly, that Reagan had won only because he was not Jimmy Carter, not because he had a mandate for his entire conservative agenda. I maintained that only a particular confluence of events had brought Reagan to the presidency, that the Republican conservatives were not as powerful as they seemed at the time, and they were unlikely to be able to convert this single election victory into a permanent governing majority. I asserted that the battle was just being joined and that events in the next few years would make the difference. I argued that only time would tell whether the Reagan election would bring about fundamental change in the American political system.
Looking back almost 30 years later I would say that we both had some insight, but that Gary proved essentially correct. The proof of Gary¡¯s argument lies not so much in the changes wrought by the Reagan administration although they were considerable. I was also pretty much correct about popular resistance to the Reagan revolution. Perhaps the most significant evidence for my argument was how popular movements like the nuclear freeze initiative forced Reagan to reverse his rearmament policies and make peace with the Soviet Union under Gorbachev.
The proof of Gary¡¯s argument about the historical significance of the Reagan election only comes when one examines the changes of the Bush years. It has often been remarked that while Bush senior is Bush junior¡¯s biological father, Ronald Reagan is W.¡¯s ideological father. The ideological fervor of the Bush administration was the culmination of a long-term conservative tide that had previously had its greatest expression in the early Reagan years.
Born Again Absolutism
There are many ways to characterize the conservative ascendancy under the Bush presidency, but to me the phrase that reveals the true way of thinking of the Bush inner circle is born again absolutism. I choose this term deliberately to highlight how the Bush ideology reflects both the revival of overtly religious discourse in the public philosophy and the growing strength of evangelical fundamentalists in American religion. Bush is certainly not the first president to bring Christianity into the public discourse. One need only compare the speeches of Woodrow Wilson to Bush¡¯s to see the similarities in their messianic view of the mission of the U.S. in world affairs. And certainly American history is replete with examples of evangelical influence over public policy, from Prohibition to the laws governing sexual conduct still on the books in many Bible Belt states. However, one does have to go back almost a century to find presidents whose rhetoric about the public domain is so full of religious references. While many presidents throughout the 20th century have testified to their private faith, very few have justified public policy with religious doctrine as often as Bush and his associates.
This religious rhetoric would not be especially
significant if it were only oratorical flourish. But in the case of many members of the
Bush administration, including the president himself, this religious rhetoric
reveals an intransigent mind set, characterized by absolute certainty, a
radical conception of a world divided into good and evil, and demonization of
foreign and domestic adversaries as absolutely evil. Whether it is the ¡°axis of evil¡± in
Bush¡¯s post 911 State of the Union address, or the statement about the war on terror
that you are either with us or against us, or Bush¡¯s early slip-up calling the
war on terror a crusade, one can see the connection between fundamentalist
religion and an absolutist mentality in the Bush White House.
After all, fundamentalist religion teaches that there is one and only one true God—all else is evil or at least error. It sees the highest form of government, the ultimate teleology of human history, as an absolute kingdom, the ¡°kingdom of God.¡± It teaches that every myth in the Bible, such as Noah¡¯s Ark or the parting of the Red Sea is absolutely true history and that everything one really needs to know about life is found in one and only one book. People whose entire belief system is built on such absolutism are not likely to turn around and practice tolerance for dissent and moral ambiguity in their political life.
Similarly, evangelism requires converting a misguided people under the spell of evil to your way of thinking. It does not conceive of finding truth as an interactive process of mutual discovery but rather to paraphrase former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld¡¯s word, ¡°they have to change because we cannot change.¡± Christian evangelism set the essential xxx of the aptly named missionary concept of American exceptionalism—that it is the United States moral duty to convert the rest of the world to its absolutely good form of politics and economics.
The Rational Kernel in the Mystical Shell
This is not to say that the doctrinaire conservatism in the Bush administration was pure mysticism. There was a rational kernel in the supernatural shell, a savvy strategy behind the seeming subservience to Limbaugh¡¯s loonies. Governing from the right is necessary to consolidate the long-term southern strategy of the Republican Party set since the Goldwater and Nixon candidacies of the 1960s. Emphasis on the conservative ideology and polarization of ideological discourse was crucial in wooing historically conservative but also historically Democratic southerners out of the Democratic party and eventually into the Republican party. However, this strategy also drove moderate Republicans out of the party. So over time, the percentage of the Republican vote that came from evangelical or fundamentalist Christians has risen to far surpass 50% of all Republican voters.
The emphasis on conservative ideology, the polarization of the parties, and the growing fraction of the Republican vote coming from right religion has thus been a two edged sword. While it has been a net gain in electoral terms, it has meant that Republicans are increasingly dependent on a strategy that at best can only bring a slim majority to their side. Thus, the rule from the right strategy increasingly entails what political scientists call a minimum winning coalition governing strategy.
The Southern Strategy, the Rise of Conservative Hegemony, and the End of Liberalism
Republican Party Government
The Polarization of American Political Parties
In electoral map
In Congress