Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Lowry argues that "[e]vents have conspired to knock the supports out from under the Wilsonian aspects of President Bush’s foreign policy." He says that Democrats are headed in this direction too, though they haven't been notable supporters of the second of the two elements of the Bush foreign policy that Lowry identifies: (1) treatment of Islamism as an aberrational departure from Islam, a "religion of peace," and (2) wedding this treatment to Wilsonian democratic idealism seeking a democratic transformation of the Middle East.

Borrowing the intellectual framework of Walter Russell Mead, Lowry identifies a trend among conservatives who seek "to detach Bush’s Jacksonianism (the hardheaded, somewhat bloody-minded nationalism) from his Wilsonianism (the crusading democratic idealism)." According to Lowry, the "to hell with them" tendency is predicated on "doubts only as the retrospective justification for the war and the war aims themselves became increasingly Wilsonian." Lowry asserts that the "to hell with them" reaction "replicates almost exactly the reaction to Vietnam."

Shortly after his 1998 re-election as governor of Texas, Republican heavyweights begin to discuss George Bush Jr. as a presidential prospect. W. is dubious. Then one day he's sitting in church, Highland Methodist in Dallas, with his mother. The pastor, Mark Craig, preaches on Moses' ambivalence about leading the Israelites out of bondage. ("Sorry, God, I'm busy," the minister has Moses responding. "I've got a family. I've got sheep to tend. I've got a life.")

Pastor Craig moves on from the allegorical portion of his sermon. The American people are "starved for leadership," he says, "starved for leaders who have ethical and moral courage." He reminds his congregation, "It's not always easy or convenient for leaders to step forward. Remember, even Moses had doubts."

Barbara Bush, the high-church Episcopalian whose husband rejected advice to insert scriptural references into his speeches because they made him uncomfortable, tells her son, "He was talking to you."

George W. Bush, the born-again Christian, apparently hears his mother's "he" as the providential He. According to Stephen Mansfield's sympathetic account in The Faith of George W. Bush, he then calls his friend, the Charismatic preacher James Robison, host of the TV show Life Today, and tells him, "I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president."