Bush’s compassionate conservatism combined social-safety retrenchment with unjustified foreign devastation.

Evidence

Elected to retroject civility (back) into the presidency, George Walker Bush could claim to “leave no child behind” and adult medically uninsured in the name of “compassionate conservatism.” With the push of the same pen he could shift public funds to private schooling and HMOs; he could order the devastation of a society in the name of wiping out “weapons of mass destruction” for which no evidence existed or could subsequently be found; and he could criminalize large portions of the world’s population so as to “keep the United States secure.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 186

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘civilization against savagery’ framing parallels rhetoric discussed in books on empire and colonial legitimation.