Politics & Power Quote by Peter Brimelow

The barb here isn’t that Bush is “OK”; it’s that “OK” is delivered like a shrug after a betrayal. Brimelow frames affirmative action and government spending as the true litmus tests of conservative authenticity, then treats everything else as background noise. That prioritization is the tell. In a single sentence, he narrows the definition of “real” right-wing governance to culture-coded redistribution and the size of the state, implying that foreign policy, executive power, and even party loyalty are secondary compared to those domestic flashpoints.

“Capitulated” does heavy lifting. It’s a wartime verb, casting policy compromise as surrender, and it smuggles in a story where conservatives are perpetually under siege and their leaders keep folding. The phrase signals to an audience that sees the Republican establishment not as a vehicle but as a problem: a party that campaigns on restraint and colorblindness, then governs with concessions to bureaucracies and civil-rights-era structures the movement was supposed to dismantle.

The kicker is the casual equivalence: “About the same as Howard Dean.” In the early-2000s political ecosystem, Dean functioned as a shorthand for mainstream liberalism with a populist edge. Collapsing Bush into Dean isn’t serious comparative policy analysis; it’s an indictment-by-proximity. It suggests the uniparty thesis avant la lettre: that both parties converge on spending and identity-linked preferences, differing mostly in branding. The “I guess” isn’t modesty. It’s contempt disguised as understatement, a way to make disillusionment sound like common sense.