Mark Grannis
During the presidency of George W. Bush, those of us who criticized U.S. foreign policy as overly hawkish tended to be considered “liberal,” a tendency neoconservatives had little reason to resist. I personally found this very frustrating, for reasons that probably mystify some readers. Does it really matter whether any given position is suitably “conservative”? It does to a conservative, because conservatives are supposed to obsess about continuity with the past. Conservatives are, by definition, strongly committed to the proposition that our received political traditions represent centuries of political wisdom which, at least in the ordinary case, should trump all but the most extraordinarily well-founded private judgments. This gives self-identified conservatives who part ways with their old cohort an unusually strong stake in substantiating the claim that “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.”
In my own family, the question has arisen from time to time whether my larger-than-life grandfather — a Taft man in the early 50s, a Goldwater delegate at the 1964 Republican Convention, and a committed Republican all his life — would have supported the Bush (43) foreign policy. My mom says yes, and I suppose I have to accept that strictly on her authority. My skepticism, however, has been renewed by a couple of recent issues of The American Conservative.
Read the Rest at Reasonable Minds
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