"High Standards" Hughie

Clark Stooksbury comments on the low standards that many Bushites have for calling someone a conservative.

I think that this Hugh Hewitt post is a good example of this.

Commenting on this excerpt from a piece written by Robert Bork:

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality).

Hugh decides to ridicule Bork by stating:

This is the same as arguing that "Except for opposing Hitler and later warning of the descent of the Iron Curtain, Churchill did not govern as a conservative."

The problem, of course, with this assertion is that Hugh Hewitt is essentially using "conservative" to mean "any government action I support." That is, he labels opposing Hitler and opposing Stalin as being inherently "conservative." While I see both positions as consistent with consrvatism, I don't see either as necessarily being "conservative" in the sense that they represent a position that is distinguished from liberal. I think that opposition to Hitler was fairly evenly distributed across that dimension of the political spectrum. Granted, I can see opposition to Stalin as being more a "conservative" thing in that Stalin had a fair number of liberal defenders, but I think that most liberal Americans hated him, too.

The fact of the matter is that Harry S Truman was a big-time liberal who opposed both Hitler and Stalin.

So Hewitt's admission that the war in Afghanistan in Iraq alone are enough to establish Bush's conservative credentials in his mind does not make a whole lot of sense, even put in the context of a historical analogy.

Of course, Bork himself is a little presumptuous in his asumption that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are particularly conservative undertakings; Afghanistan strikes me as a necessary measure that had the support of most of the people on both ends of this dimension of the political spectrum (and a smattering of opposition on both). Iraq, on the other hand, can be seen as a liberal folly of Wilsonian messianic democratism as much as, if not more than, an action of conservative realpolitik. So Hugh's no the only one confued about conservatism here.

That is all.