re: What is a "Bush Republican" to you?

You can see in picture alone that Vance wasn’t ready for understanding. He’s since undergone a major change after seeing the outcomes

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Like now?

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Swamp

Bush Republicans? Several things. Kowtowing to more of a corporate-globalist business agenda, outsourcing our manufacturing base, and equally weak on border security and illegal immigration. Hence, zero interest in preserving American sovereignty, heritage, and culture. Related, never standing in the way of the left's full-bore barrage on the social-domestic agenda, apparently finding it unseemly to get into such lowly frays, and preferring 'decorum' with their good buddies across the aisle.

Which is why I have nothing but contempt for Bush-style Republicans. I despise it as much as I despise the commie left. MAGA might be a sloppy mess, and prone to dingbat conspiracy thinking, and even too big-government liberal for my tastes, but it's still overwhelmingly preferable to the cretinous Bush-Romney-McCain RINO Republicanism.

A Bush Republican is a neocon.

Not a conservative at all.

Great answers. Probably why this board is so fricked up. Republicans during the Bush terms won way more battles against the Dems than the Trump Republicans. You guys are a weird bunch.

a bush republican is a country club republican. the rich peoples party. back in the day there was a conservative wing of the democratic party. blue collar workers with conservative views. the republicans back then were the bankers, business owners etc. george h w bush was the nafta guy. send the jobs overseas. he represented big business.

Generally, someone representative of Reagan era “Movement Conservatism”. The elite coalition that includes all the groups that had problems with the New Deal to Great Society liberal coalition that governed America basically unopposed after the end of World War II. The coalition included business leaders, libertarians, neocons, tories, segregationists, moral majority Christians, the prolife movement, nationalists, and conservative populists.

Since Reagan, the latter half were always junior partners in the relationship, at least at the national level. In practice this meant that there was a lot of posturing around issues like abortion, crime, or immigration for election purposes, but then actual governance was about increasing the role of the free market. This meant not only cuts in taxes and regulations, but a belief in the free movement of goods, services, and people across borders to lower prices and increase economic efficiency. This created a divide within the movement between people like Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan who wanted to return things to the past, or at least halt the present; and the people in charge who were busy unleashing the market as an engine of change.

To the extent that Bush Republican is unique from that is after 9/11 the neocons rose to the top of the coalition. The neocons basically had a capitalist variation on Trotskyite socialism. Instead of trying to push the international dictatorship of the proletariat, they want American ideas of human rights, transparency, and democracy to be the law of the land throughout the world. The last two decades have really been bad for neocons. While they had the height of their power, China emerged as an undemocratic global power, Russia, Turkey, and Brazil are all regional powers that backslid away from democracy. The “Arab Spring” replaced depots and oligarchs, with fundamentalist Muslims. And most viscerally, Iraq and Afghanistan ended as failures.

Enter Trump, who broke the conservative coalition in favor of the national populists and protections and who is far more supportive of the Christian right, and the white indentity voters and groups than any previous Republican administration would ever have been. All the other groups have either left the Republican Party or bent the knee.

So in short, when someone says Bush Republican, they generally mean a Republican of influence from the pre-Trump era, that is no longer a Republican, or a never Trump Republican, and who beliefs are either in the free market alone, or who has a childish and naive belief in the rule of law, precedent, and an elitist Tory disposition towards the status quo. Ie: it doesn’t matter if you hate the New Deal, we’ve lived under it for 80 years, and so we undue it at our peril. They also mean someone who is post-racial in their race ideas.

AWATALAD for the most part