Is Bush Conservative Enough?

Just how conservative is the Bush administration? This is a question liberals have no trouble answering. They point to many items on an agenda long associated with the activist wing of the Republican Party: a parade of ideologically driven judicial nominees, a tax plan that rewards the rich even as the working poor are being lopped off employment rolls and, above all, a go-it-alone America-first foreign policy.

But one notable group of critics has serious doubts about the administration's commitment to conservative ideals: American conservatives. For months now, a chorus on the right, growing in volume and clarity, has been challenging the White House's motives and aims. You can hear it in the pages of the American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan's new magazine. Its critiques of the Bush administration's overseas adventurism and "Wall Street socialism" have sharpened with each issue.

You can hear it too in the back and forth on the conservativenet listserv, an Internet discussion group in which scholars, most of them conservatives and many of them historians, have been dissecting the philosophical foundations of policymakers in the Bush administration who seem wedded to an American gigantism starkly at odds with the movement's core principles.

And I got an earful of it this spring when I spoke to 150 members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute -- a national organization of student conservatives who immerse themselves in classic political and philosophical writings.

The war in Iraq was going well. And they were pleased. But they wondered why some conservatives, like the editors of the Weekly Standard, were squelching debate about the war and throwing around scare words like "appeasement."

What alarms these conservatives, young and old, is not so much the specific policies of the Bush administration as its appetite for an ever-enlarging, all-powerful government, a post- 9/11 version of statism, the bete noire of conservatism and the subject of one of the movement's founding texts, Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, the State."

Published in 1935, this manifesto analyzes centralization in the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its expanding bureaucracies and new entitlements. In Nock's view, the New Deal bore disturbing resemblances to new dictatorships arising overseas. The connection seemed remote, because FDR was so genial and because Americans were "the most un-philosophical of beings," immune to doctrines of the kind espoused by Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.