They began as Gladstonian Liberals [1] with a strong anti-communist and pro-British imperialism streak.
The linguistic similarity between liberal and libertarian isn’t just a coincidence. For both traditions, one of the foundational principles was the “liberty” to make profit without being limited by things like pay and safety minimums for workers.
But, yeah; the liberal wing of the party has been in freefall ever since Keating beat Peacock. Howard was a racist Tory to begin with, and dragged the party further right in response to One Nation. Turnbull is a liberal, but he’s a weak and gutless one who is capitulating to the conservative wing of the party.
Meanwhile, Bernardi’s schism are beginning as theocrats but will probably end up going fash. I’m watching for them to try and absorb the Hansonites and other anti-immigrant parties.
[1] Bob Menzies’ brother was named Frank Gladstone Menzies, BTW.
The massive outpouring of nostalgia for Reagan belongs in the same category as remembering Bush fondly.
Time blurs the details. Folks forget the day to day struggles. The fog of the past tends to give way to nostalgia for “a simpler better time” and they think about that time they went on a date and had a nice evening back in the 90s, and Friends was on, and gosh, Bush was just a yokel, right? Ha ha, good times. They forget about the daily horror of war and watching our money go up in flames.
Yeah, but not everyone falls for that cognitive bias, and even many of those folks are saying this worn-out baseball glove tightly gripping a turd is the worst Prez yet.
George W. Bush was a complete and total disaster as a president, but he’s still a better person than Trump. Like, looking at Bush, you can be sure that he can conceive of a world that doesn’t entirely revolve around himself, that he actually has beliefs and ideas beyond the immediate satisfaction of his ego, that you could actually have a functional conversation with him.
Put short, I can imagine that in some different context – no 9/11, no Cheney and the various neocons in his inner circle – Bush could have been an acceptable president. Trump? Not in a billion years.
Not really. Libertarianism was far-left until the name was stolen by classical liberals who were unhappy about social liberalism.
Seventeen years (1857) after Proudhon first called himself an anarchist (1840), anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque was the first person to describe himself as a libertarian.
I don’t think there is an easy way to measure this. For that matter, how much of the general population actually knows Bush or somebody close to him? Our entire view of him (or any political figure/celebrity) is based on what we see in the media, something that can be carefully managed. We just don’t know, and unless there are a lot of tell-all biographies from people in his inner circle that corroborate each other, we probably never will know. Anyway, whether Bush is a better person than Trump is irrelevant.
Just remember that “liberal” in USA means something different than in the rest of the world. Liberals are to the right and supposed to be for free market and a small state. To the left you have socialists and social democrats, but those words have been more or less banned in the US political landscape.
I feel like people just can’t accept Trump as a logical consequence of the road America has been on for decades. And in a way that’s fair because Trump lost by 3M votes and him being president kind of has to be regarded as a fluke. But if he hadn’t won, there’s a good chance a racist nationalist who was better at feigning empathy and who didn’t have an Access Hollywood tape would have won in the near future. Someone who would have a real plant to take the country apart instead of just spinning out chaos like a hurricane spins out tornadoes.
Bush is very clearly part of that road.
I’ll admit it’s easy to like Bush more than Trump.
Of all of the possible candidates out there who promised to change things, give people money, and get rid of Obamacare, Trump’s really the only one who made it really clear that he had a vicious blood vendetta against Obama. There’s plenty of other racist nationalists out there (boy howdy!) but it’s rare to find one who wasn’t afraid to just flat out say “Mexican people are rapists” and “the President is Kenyan” and get people to chant death-cult slogans against his opponent.
This is where we are today… longing for the days of the Bush admin. I am 56 and I have voted since I was of legal age. My first election was Carter/Raygun and I voted for Carter and I have voted Deomocrat in every single election in my life. However, in my lifetime this nation has lurched further and further to the right and every time it is worse than before. My friend was telling me, “Oh, after the Obama years, this is just the country swinging back to middle.” NO! There is no middle. When Repugnantcans are elected they burn down the house and leave us diminished as a nation. When Democrats are elected, it is all they can do to hold the status quo, or in Obama’s terms, spending all of his eight years in office just to get us back to a semblance of a normal economy, after the disastrous Bush years. The working class and middle class are losing ground with each decade that passes. And still… those that voted for Trump support him. This nation suffers from a deep psychosis and the mental patients have taken over the asylum. Goddess help us all.
It’s hard for me to separate the way in which that helped him from the way in which it hurt him. Obviously it put some people off of him, but it was the strongest possible signal that he was an outsider, unbound by the rules of politics. I can’t think of any other way he could have gotten his cred as a non-elite. (I know there is a voting block that actually goes to the ballot box on racism, but they also voted against Obama, presumably, and probably would have also voted against Clinton even if the Republican candidate hadn’t been overtly racist)
I think it’s more of an emotive reaction to the election than to the fact that GWB was as bad (perhaps worse, it depends on what you compare Bush and Trump on). It’s one of those things that either people shake themselves out of it and realize that the system that makes bad people leaders does so by design (then abandon the bad politics and ideology that drives it) or they keep thinking their hashtag resistance moderatism will some how magically repair it.
