Free A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency by Glenn Greenwald

conservative, and as was demonstrated in the preceding chapter, the conservative political movement claimed him as its own and was largely responsible for both his 2000 and 2004 election victories.
    Political conservatism in the United States, however, has two meanings. In one sense, it is an abstract theory of government that—in its pure, academic form—advocates various political principles. In this academic formulation, conservatism is defined by a belief in (a) restrained federal government power, (b) minimal federal taxes and responsible and limited spending, (c) a generalized distrust of the federal government and its attempts to intervene into the private lives of citizens, (d) reliance on the private sector rather than the federal government to achieve “Good” ends, (e) a preference for state and local autonomy over federalized and centralized control, (f) trusting in individuals rather than government officials to make decisions, and (g) an overarching belief in the supremacy of the rule of law.
    But the term conservatism also refers to a group of political figures and their supporters who call themselves conservatives. In this version, conservatism is defined by the actions taken and the policies implemented in reality by conservatives when they are in power rather than by what think tanks and theorists set forth as conservative principles.
    This dichotomy is not unique to conservatism. All political theories can be understood as a set of principles, or, independently, as the collection of policies and methods of governance that its adherents, in practice , undertake when in power. Communism, for instance, exists as a sterile, academic theory in the works of Karl Marx and the speeches of Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro. At that theoretical level, communism constitutes harmonious egalitarianism in which all are liberated from capitalistic enslavement and material wants, and thus are freed to pursue more elevated levels of creativity and personal fulfillment.
    But when its adherents—“Communists”—have obtained power, they have not behaved in conformity with these pretty utopian principles. They have almost uniformly imposed tyranny and wrought profound misery. The term communism, then, is not understood exclusively—or even primarily—by reference to the abstract principles defining it in books and in speeches. Rather, it is best and most commonly understood to describe the actions of Communists when in power.
    Like communism, the theory of American political “conservatism” in the pure, abstract Hayek-Goldwater sense has rarely, if ever, converged with the actions and policies of self-described conservatives when in power. And, like communism, perhaps the very nature of theoretical conservatism means that it never can.
    Arguably, the imperatives of human nature and the instincts of government leaders—to attempt to enhance rather than restrict their own power—constitute an insurmountable barrier to the implementation of “pure” conservatism, an idealistic vision where elected government officials proceed to limit or even dismantle the mechanisms of their own power. Additionally, elected officials in the American political system must often support government programs benefiting a political movement’s constituents as a condition of retaining their power, thereby rendering the reduction, let alone the abolition, of excessive government spending virtually impossible.
    Whether political conservatism in the United States has ever really existed can be and continues to be endlessly debated. The allegedly purest form of it, as embodied by Ronald Reagan, oversaw an expansion of the power of the federal government in countless ways. That expansion of power was accompanied by wild deficit spending. The Reagan administration ushered in a significant increase in domestic discretionary spending (though far less than that which has occurred under the Bush administration). And multiple Reagan officials were