I often raised objections in conversation to this exhortation. What reason did we have to think that George W. Bush would avert all those disasters? Exactly none. The evidence was all the other way, massively and conclusively. The best response I ever got from the reluctant Bush warriors (which I still hear all the time) was "at least Bush is a good Christian man" who would cleanse the White House of the sewage left behind by the long incumbency of Clinton. As if Bush were running against Clinton rather than Gore. This about a man who professed a shallow, carnival" tent version of Christianity. A Christian who has subsequently altered the American creed of "Protestant, Catholic, and Jew" to "Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and Muslim." And given his stand on immigration, we will soon have Santeria and Hinduism added.
Wilson also takes issue with the most sacred of cows among many conservatives - the Reagan revolution. He says the revolution never occurred, that it was stillborn because of the meddling of Establishment (read Northern) Republicans, who are also sometimes neo-conservatives.
Nostalgists still hearken back to the Reagan Revolution, which never took place except in imagination. The Reagan Revolution was over before the nomination was formalized, when the bankers forced him to accept a "mainstream" Republican on the ticket. The crusade to restrain the federal government, to correct the fraud, incompetence, insolence, and extravagance of its departments, never even got out of port, much less sailed for the Holy Land. And whatever moral capital was left was picked up by the Establishment Republicans once more. Clearly Bush the Previous had no affinity for the social conservatives he had to pretend to care for. Like his son, his instincts on the social questions were pure northeastern Liberal Republican. Previous Bush’s Liberal Republican appointee to head the National Endowment of the Artssubsidized Mapplethorpe and the other abominations. Out in the provinces there were many very talented, under-recognized artists who might have been encouraged, some of whom had even voted Republican, but of course they were not Establishment.
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