I’m not sure else where to try finding them.
Conservatism abandons Bush | TPMCafe:
It is obvious that the intellectual discipline of conservatism has gotten as much use out of George W. Bush as it can and that it cannot afford to indulge him any longer. Fukuyama’s foreign policy critique is of a piece with Bruce Bartlett’s dissection of Bush’s failed economic tactics. Serious conservatives are apoplectic over the destruction this president has wrought in their name. They want their movement back.
This leaves counterfeit populists such as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly to defend Bush. These are people for whom conservatism has never been anything more than a meal ticket. They have watched Bush shatter America’s standing in the world with his blundering foreign policy and wreck the economy with his promiscuous devotion to tax cuts and spending increases and their only response has been to cheer louder. He betrays Christian values and they reinterpret Christianity in his defense. He lies and they redefine the truth. He breaks the law and they indict the law.
Sadly for conservatism, it is probably too late for its deepest thinkers to correct the damage done under Bush. Conservative intellectuals have reason on their side, but even the sharpest argument is too blunt an instrument to use against visceral conservatives who will, literally, stick their fingers in their ears to avoid hearing what they do not wish to hear.
Fukuyama is a brilliant writer, but to whom does he write? The voting base of the Republican Party don’t read the New York Times. They read Ann Coulter, who advocates blowing up the New York Times. If Coulter tells them that killing “ragheads” is the purest expression of American foreign policy, they take her word for it. If Rush Limbaugh tells them they can eliminate taxation without losing the government services those taxes pay for, they say “bring ’em on!” They don’t care to examine the intellectual inconsistency of a small-government president who has expanded the size and scope of government to the degree that Bush has. They don’t even perceive the inconsistency. What can conservative intellectuals say to persuade such people?
No, what Mr. Fukuyama sees is not merely the end of neoconservatism. It is conservatism itself that lies discredited and discarded at the feet of George W. Bush. He was anointed the standard-bearer for a philosophy he did not even understand. Conservative thinkers looked the other way while Bush set their house on fire. All they can do now is clear away the charred ruins and begin, painstakingly, to rebuild. However, they are fooling themselves if they think the new structure will resemble the old.
I would ask how they could have failed to realize their serial failure president was going to let them down, but choosing power over policy, politics over government, is an old story. Some victory . . .
