DO YOU REMEMBER THE SIGHTS and sounds of campaign 2000? Al and Tipper’s big kiss. Chaka Khan closing the show at the ultra-inclusive Republican convention. Granny D. marching for campaign finance reform at Arianna Huffington’s Shadow Convention. There were slogans like “Prosperity With a Purpose” and “The People Versus the Powerful”; and issues like lockboxes, Internet invention, and so on. They all seem so far away now—and they are. The entire 2000 presidential campaign was predicated on peace and prosperity. How should we take advantage of the good times? But now peace is gone and prosperity is ailing. The issues that dominated the race for the presidency will not dominate this presidency. And so we have entered a new political era. And it really is new. Conservatives like Grover Norquist are now lobbying against Bush legislation. The country’s most prominent Republicans suddenly include Tom Ridge and Rudy Giuliani. The Democratic party has rediscovered the hawkish legacy of Scoop Jackson. Bipartisanship is a fact, and not just an aim. It’s becoming quite clear that this war effort will fundamentally alter the political landscape, perhaps as dramatically as Vietnam did, bringing new issues to the fore, new coalitions, new correlations of forces. Nobody has grasped the dramatic change as quickly as George W. Bush. Back at the Republican convention, Bush spoke about how his father’s generation had been called to wage an epic struggle for freedom. The World War II generation was, the younger Bush declared, “a generation of Americans who stormed beaches, liberated concentration camps, and delivered us from evil.” Bush went on to say that his own boomer generation would be defined not by war, but by its ability to rebuild families and communities. The nation’s greatness, he said, would be preserved through “small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial.” The emphasis was on “small”—the local, the intimate. Bush cited Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry, Sharing and Caring Hands, serves meals to the homeless. This was the language of compassionate conservatism. This was Bush celebrating the nurturing virtues, rallying the armies of compassion. “We must show courage in a time of blessing,” Bush said in his inaugural address. “Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love.” Well, the time of blessing ended on September 11, and compassionate conservatism will not define the Bush presidency. These days Bush is summoning not just the armies of compassion, but also real armies. Now his emphasis is on not the local, but the global. It is on not intimate acts of caring, but large exercises in defense of freedom. The reports coming out of the White House suggest that Bush truly understands how the attack has changed his presidency and will define his term. He feels that he was put on earth to help the nation respond to this crisis, some of his aides say. Indeed, the most powerful line in his post-attack speech to the Congress was, “And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment.” At the National Cathedral he effectively amended his convention speech, saying that each generation—and not just the World War II one—is called upon to fight for freedom, “and the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.” In his responses to the attack, Bush has, at once, been utterly consistent with his former self, and also totally transformed. There is still the same moral earnestness. Recall that at the convention he celebrated his father’s generation for having “delivered us from evil.” At the National Cathedral, Bush said the nation’s task was to “rid the world of evil.” The categories of Bush’s thought, before the attack and after, are shaped by his faith. He is the opposite of a wonk, an economic determinist, or a realist diplomat; every idea he expresses is infused with moral purpose. He immediately cast this war on terrorism as a great moral struggle. THE FIRST BIG CHANGE IN BUSH IS in the scale of his thinking. Before, he was thinking like a governor. His emphasis was on the local, on the little platoons. Now, in response to the attack, he is thinking like a president, as the leader of a superpower. Burke said that our love of little platoons is but “the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love of our country and to mankind.” Elevated to the highest office, and having assumed the responsibilities of that office, Bush has now traced the links upward. He is speaking as an energetic chief executive. It wasn’t that long ago when important parts of the Republican party were consumed by a visceral hatred of all things federal. Government was described as “evil”; Washington was a swamp, a muck of “inside the Beltway” operators. But times of conflict don’t allow the luxury of fatuous populism. The most striking feature of Bush’s speech to the joint session of Congress was its strenuous tone. There were in fact echoes of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1899 speech “The Strenuous Life”: “We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks and woe to us if we fail to perform them,” TR declared. Bush, in turn, called on his listeners to accept a great patriotic challenge, which would take time and cost lives. He defined the enemy broadly, to include not only Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, but the regimes that support them and other terrorist networks of global reach. He effectively called for the rollback of rogue regimes that nurture the violent enemies of peace and freedom. He called upon America to shape the world—”This country will define our times, not be defined by them.” Once a president has committed himself to that grand agenda, he can’t go back and settle for a managerial presidency with small accomplishments. It would look too much like retreat. The second big change is that this will be an era defined by foreign conflict, not domestic conciliation or “changing the tone,” as Bush used to put it. The president has already demonstrated that he has a new role. Before, the president’s main job was to seek common ground so he could pass his education, patients’ bill of rights, and faith-based initiatives. Now Bush’s task is to keep the government’s focus on the main goal: destroying terrorism. All around him, there are people consumed with a million and one parochial concerns and distractions. There will be relentless pressure to pull back from the ambitious set of goals the president has laid out. The secretary of state has to contend with the intricacies of all those alliances, dialogues, and negotiations. Inevitably, his bureaucracy is going to behave as if coalition-building were more important than destroying terror. The bureaucrats will try to remove Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas, and others from the target list so as to make their job of maintaining alliance cohesion easier. Meanwhile, the secretary of defense will have his own rivalries and institutional incentives to deal with. Last week, for example, Secretary Rumsfeld wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, the last half of which read as if it had been conceived by dot-com executives, circa 1997. The war would be waged in cyberspace, he wrote. The uniforms would be “bankers’ pinstripes and programmers’ grunge just as assuredly as desert camouflage.” This is the sort of high-tech infatuation we often see emanating from that bureaucracy. It’s not so much that it’s silly—though it led us to base our intelligence strategy on high-tech satellites—it’s just that it’s a tempting retreat from the difficult but necessary business of eliminating the human beings who organize terror. The Founders designed the presidency so that the person who holds the office will have the highest vantage point, and be able to see the entire field, and so separate parochial distractions from the essential goal. Wartime presidents have to perpetually remind those around
them of the core mission. Lincoln was continually forced to urge his generals to be more aggressive. President Bush was in that tradition when he declared, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” That was exactly the sort of clarity a president in such an era must provide. The third great change is in the nature of the president’s base, his domestic coalition. Bush was elevated to office by an alliance of two movements: social conservatives and free-market economic conservatives. Those groups are the core of the Republican party. But they are insufficient to see the president through the coming months and years. Some social conservatives reacted badly to the attack on September 11. Nobody is going to be in the mood for a domestic culture war anytime soon. The American public will revile those who treat New York as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. If there’s one thing we learned it’s that New Yorkers are capable of great acts of patriotism and heroism, no matter how they vote or where they stand on issues like homosexuality and abortion. Many of the analyses of cultural rot were overdrawn, and the social issues will simply not top the agenda over the next months or years. In any case, religion is both too grand and too sectarian to make the basis for the coming struggle. America does not fight holy wars. George W. Bush cannot call on explicitly Christian language because it excludes too many who are full partners in this effort. Some free marketeers also reacted badly to the attack on September 11. A few seemed to fear the U.S. government, and its possible growth, more than the foreign terrorists. In any case, few sensible Americans and few sensible free marketeers will be sympathetic to people who denigrate public service and a vigorous federal response to the attack. They understand that the economic mentality, which holds that all behavior is a question of incentives, cannot explain the Taliban, and offers no language with which to respond to it. Most Americans understand that the sacrifices that will be required have nothing to do with economic self-interest or the invisible hand. Whatever virtue privatization may have when it comes to Social Security reform, the response to terror can’t be privatized. So instead of merely celebrating faith-based organizations, or summoning forth the entrepreneurial spirit, President Bush will now have to rally the party of patriotism, which is the massive majority who are waving flags and telling pollsters they are ready for a long, costly effort. He’ll have to rally them with words. President Bush didn’t plan to have a rhetorical presidency, but it will now be incumbent upon him to give intellectual content to the love of country that is so conspicuous these days. He’ll have to explain to the world why America is fighting so hard and so ruthlessly. When a big, rich country attacks a poor little one, some will call it imperialism. President Bush will have to explain what America is fighting for, and why this effort is not just a case of a big power pushing around a little power. Bush will also have to respond to all the domestic “moderates” who, while not siding with the terrorists, have rediscovered the old Cold War arguments for non-intervention: We don’t want to ratchet up the cycle of violence; we have to understand the seedbed of terror is poverty; we have to concede that the people who hate us have a point; the real answer is to fund a Marshall Plan here, there, and everywhere. Responding to those arguments will take ideological self-confidence, a concrete understanding of the American ideal that is under attack. Finally, Bush will have to rally the party of patriotism on domestic as well as foreign issues. The budget hawks have been weakened. There is a demand for activism, as there always is during wartime. But Bush will have to make sure that wartime activism is more like the Civil War activism that brought us the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and other measures designed to encourage competition and enterprise than it is like Vietnam War activism, which brought us the Great Society. During the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, political debate was dominated by multiculturalists, who divided us along race and gender lines; by culture warriors, who divided us on moral lines; by class-resentment liberals and corporatist conservatives, who treated economic issues as if they were paramount. Now we remember that America is a cause and not just a free trade zone, and that the American people are fundamentally united, not divided. Somebody once said that Americans don’t ever settle their great issues, they just move beyond them. Since September 11, we have moved beyond many of the issues that dominated the 1990s, and so far President Bush has done a good job of greeting the new political era that awaits us. There is certainly no going back. David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
