Andrew Sullivan: Bush’s triumph conceals the great conservative crack-up

À direita, as primárias de 2008 prometem ser animadas. Se a radicalização à esquerda do Partido Democrata tem vindo a possibilitar aos republicanos gerir as suas fracturas internas, a situação não será provavelmente sustentável por muito mais tempo. Quer a nível de política externa, quer de política interna, prevejo que os defensores do big government "conservatism" enfrentem cada vez maior oposição à direita.

Andrew Sullivan: Bush’s triumph conceals the great conservative crack-up

Beneath the surface, however, American conservatism is in increasing trouble. The Republican coalition, always fragile, now depends as much on the haplessness of the Democrats as on its own internal logic. On foreign and domestic policy alike the American right is splintering. With no obvious successor to George W Bush that splintering will deepen.###

Take foreign policy. At the moment Bush is riding high as his democratisation push seems to have made some modest progress in the Middle East. But the Iraq war was deeply controversial among conservatives before the war and it has become more so since. Old school conservatives — or "realists", as they call themselves — had no time for nation building or for wars of liberation among cultures they viewed as irredeemably undemocratic.

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Back home the differences over fiscal policy are also profound. President Bush has added $1 trillion (£520 billion) to the national debt in only four years and is proposing to add at least another $2 trillion with his social security reform. With his Medicare prescription drug benefit, about whose massive expense he deceived Congress, he has enacted the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson. Bush has increased spending on medical care for the poor by 46%. He has doubled education spending in four years; federal housing spending has gone up 86%.

Compared with Bill Clinton, he’s an extreme, big government liberal. In fact the only real difference between the Democrats and Republicans at this point is that the Democrats believe in big, solvent government and the Republicans believe in an even bigger, insolvent government.

Conservatives are complaining. Two powerful think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, have published critiques of Bush’s fiscal policies. Heritage called for an outright repeal of the new healthcare entitlement.

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Gone are the days when Ronald Reagan said: "The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralised authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is."

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In my view if a Democratic president had Bush’s record, the Republican party would have come close to impeaching him for his adventures in big government, fiscal insanity and foreign policy liberalism. But it swallowed its principles and covered up its differences to keep him (and itself) in power. The consequences are slowly becoming clear.

The race to succeed Bush will become, in part, a battle for the future of American conservatism. I have no idea how it will turn out. But I do have one clear prediction: the Republican internal battle in the next four years is going to be bloody. After the mid-term elections in 2006 it will be brutal.