Abstract
When George W. Bush entered the White House, it was widely assumed that his objective would be to consolidate and extend the conservative agenda in public policy started by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The fortieth president had enjoyed mixed success in his efforts to implement that agenda,1 but the forty-third promised to buttress the initial building blocks of the Reagan revolution. Writing in 2003, Steven Schier reflected that Bush’s ambition cast him, in Stephen Skowronek’s typology, as a president of “articulation”: “The primary project of the Bush presidency is the completion of the political reconstruction of national politics, government and policy begun by Ronald Reagan in 1981.”2 Using a slightly different terminology but to the same effect, Skowronek himself commented in the wake of Bush’s election: “This first unified Republican government in the post-Reagan era is opening a pivotal episode in orthodox innovation.”3 In other words, one measure of the Bush presidency would be to examine his capacity both to implement conservative ideas and to develop them into a winning political brand. According to Gillian Peele, central to Bush’s conservatism was “a determination to reduce the role of government.”4
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Notes
Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1997).
Stephen Skowronek, “The Setting: Change and Continuity in the Politics of Leadership,” in Michael Nelson, ed., The Elections of 2000 (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), 22.
Though this is not a comprehensive list, these works were amongst the more notable attacks on Bush from acknowledged conservatives: Bruce Bartlett, Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2006);
Michael Tanner, Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution (Washington DC: Cato Institute, 2007);
Richard A. Viguerie, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other “Big Government” Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause (Los Angeles, Bonus Books, 2006);
Stephen Slivinski, Buck Wild: How Republicans Blew the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government (Washington DC: Cato Institute, 2006),
and Ryan Sager, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party (New Jersey: Wiley, 2006).
Fred Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush, (New York: Crown Forum, 2006); Daniel Casse, “Is Bush a Conservative?” Commentary, February 2004.
Hugh Heclo, “Ronald Reagan and the American Public Philosophy,” in W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 32.
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).
Allen J. Matusow, The Unravelling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row: 1984).
Iwan Morgan, Beyond the Liberal Consensus: A Political History of the United States since 1965 (London: Hurst, 1994).
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1944).
On Hayek’s importance to the development of American conservative thought, see E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)
and George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, 2nd ed. (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996).
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Why America Is Different, (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 412.
The term “New Right” is potentially confusing. In his authoritative account of American conservatism George Nash equates the New Right with the Religious Right (The Conservative Intellectual Movement, 331). That is not how the term is used here. This chapter takes a broader conception of the New Right that is perhaps still best understood through a classic work of British political scholarship-see Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
Gary Jacobson, A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People (New York: Pearson Education, 2007).
George W. Bush, President Promotes Compassionate Conservatism (Washington DC: Office of the Press Secretary, April 30, 2002).
John Fortier and Norman Ornstein, “President Bush: Legislative Strategist,” in Fred Greenstein, ed., The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 151.
Barbara Sinclair, “Context, Strategy, and Chance: George W. Bush and the 107th Congress,” in Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman, eds., The George W. Bush Presidency (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2004), 115.
Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 159.
Mark Smith, The Right Talk: How Conservatives Turned the Great Society into the Economic Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 291.
Iwan Morgan, “The Bush Administration and the Budget Deficit,” in Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies, eds., Right On? Political Change and Continuity in George W. Bush’s America (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2006), 113.
Robert Pear and Robin Toner, “A Final Push in Congress: The Overview; Sharply Split House Passes Broad Medicare Overhaul; Forceful Lobbying by Bush,” New York Times, November 23, 2003;
Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Free Press, 2007), 280.
Joel Aberbach, “The Political Significance of the George W. Bush Administration,” Social Policy and Administration, 39, 2, 2005, 141.
George Edwards, Governing by Campaigning: The Politics of the Bush Presidency (New York: Pearson, 2007), 16–17.
Daniel Beland and Alex Waddan, “Taking ‘Big Government Conservatism’ Seriously? The Bush Presidency Reconsidered,” Political Quarterly, 79, 1, 2008, 115.
Fiona Ross, “Policy Histories and Partisan Leadership in Presidential Studies: The Case of Social Security,” in George Edwards and Desmond King, eds., The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 419–46.
Suzanne Mettler, “The Transformed Welfare State and the Redistribution of Political Voice,” in Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
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© 2010 Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Waddan, A. (2010). Bush and Big Government Conservatism. In: Morgan, I., Davies, P.J. (eds) Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114333_9
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