Judging George: George W. Bush and the Fracturing of the Republican Party

Pundits, political actors, journalists, and academics inform us, with tedious regularity, that we live in an age of bitterly intense partisanship. The precise origin of this divide is debated, as are its exact contours, but the fact of an unbridgeable political chasm separating members of the two major political parties is treated as a foundational fact of our contemporary political life. No single political figure presents a clearer marker of the intensity, the depth, and the implacability of the partisanship governing our communal life than George W. Bush. Bush, in fact, has become something of a Rorschach test of political belief: Republicans who do not ignore him (he was certainly invisible at their recent national nominating convention) defend him or his policies; Democrats see in him the incarnation of all that is wrong with American politics. One's position on Bush is a clear indication of one's politics—marking foremost one's party identification and, for Republicans, increasingly also one's position on the internal debate currently threatening to fracture the conservative movement.¹

Bush is, therefore, most interesting as a starting point from which we can begin to understand the contemporary conservative movement and the rifts that threaten to fracture it, for it was Bush's efforts to forge a new and lasting Republican majority that galvanized opposition and first exposed the ideological fault lines within conservatism that became so clear in the 2012 elections. While there are a great many books on Bush, ranging from personal accounts that focus on him as an individual and on the individual choices he made² to accounts of his actions written by partisans and ideologues,³ the most useful treatments of Bush and his presidency are those that carefully place both his personal choices and the political consequences of those choices within an analytic context.

Too much of the work on Bush, to my mind, appears to be written with the goal of either attack or defense. My objection to much of this work is not that I disagree with specific premises (although I sometimes do), but that it so often fails to take Bush seriously. In the more extreme manifestations, authors who favor ideology (of either the Right or the Left) over analysis make Bush something of a cartoon.⁴ And as president, George W. Bush was no cartoon, but a dedicated, often wily political actor, who knew what he wanted and frequently manifested great skill in getting it. Luckily, neither of the defenses of Bush discussed here caricatures him, although neither offers the sustained and careful contextualization I think his presidency demands, either.

Stephen Knott's book, Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, for example, is an unapologetic defense of President Bush. Rooted in a specific—and importantly, clearly defined—understanding of presidential prerogative and a unitary theory of presidential power, Knott goes to great lengths to argue that Bush's presidency is best understood as a logical continuation in the trajectory of presidential authority, and not as making radical, or even especially noteworthy, changes in that trajectory.

Knott is correct in assailing many of the unbalanced criticisms of Bush (see especially pages 5-21), noting their "intemperate" nature (18...