Throughout this week, I have urged readers of TIA Daily to be "anti-Bushites for Bush."

[see the note at the end of the article]

On Tuesday, I wrote:

"Both parts of the slogan 'anti-Bushites for Bush' imply the need for vigorous action. By being 'for Bush,' I meant that we should actively advocate and promote Bush's re-election, but do so on specific, narrow grounds: that it is necessary to fight an offensive war against terrorism and to fundamentally reform the political system of the Middle East. But we should also be prepared, after the election, to immediately and vigorously oppose everything that is wrong with the Bush agenda--to demand that he live up to his fierce rhetoric in prosecuting the war, and to oppose his attempts to expand the welfare state and inject religion into politics."

I would like to offer more specific advice on how we should achieve these goals.

First, a bit of advice on how to be _for_ Bush: don't oversell him. Don't promote him as a strong and unyielding opponent of terrorist states. Explain to people that we need to be even _stronger_, that we need to stop making compromises and concessions, and that going on the offensive against terrorism means turning our attention to Iran, the main threat to the civilized world today. Then say that you support Bush because he is the only candidate who has even a prayer (so to speak) of going halfway in this direction.

And that leads me to the question of how to be an anti-Bushite.

It now seems likely that Bush will win the election, given the stunning incompetence of the Kerry campaign and the effectiveness of the Republican convention, which emphasized Bush's strongest issues and buried his weakest ones. So even those who do not plan to vote for Bush need to prepared with specific measures to oppose his worse policies during his second term.

How should we do it?

-- Work to create a pro-war opposition.

Until the election, I'll be campaigning under the banner of "Anti-Bushites for Bush." After the election, I'll be arguing under the banner of "Anti-Bushites for the Bush Doctrine."

One of the problems with the anti-ideological nature of modern politics is that many people are more loyal to a party or to a personality than they are to a policy or a principle. Thus, if the leader of their party takes a position weakly in favor of fighting the war on terrorism, they feel the need to "stand by their man" and defend his policies. The result: political arguments become a debate between Bush's muddled policies and the full-blown pacifism of the left--leaving no room in the argument for those who want to pursue policies even stronger and more assertive.

Add to this the fact that pragmatists react to the political pressures they feel being exerted on them--and the main pressure being exerted on the Bush administration right now is from the anti-war types. The main pressure is to seek more involvement from the UN, to show more sensitivity about mosques and civilian casualties, to delegate even more authority to the weak and divided new government in Baghdad. What we need to do is to create political pressure in the opposite direction.

A few of the better conservative pundits have been steadily criticizing Bush for his compromises. But we need to step up the pressure and work to create a fully fledged _pro-war_ opposition. Specifically, we need to encourage an active and vocal lobby for war against Iran.

As I wrote yesterday, Bush's contradictions make things easier for us. All we have to do is stand for the presidential doctrine to which President Bush has given his name. All we have to do is to demand that America plan a unilateral and pre-emptive attack on the one country that is both the world's largest sponsor of terrorism and the regime closest to developing a nuclear weapon.

At the Republican convention, Bush and his supporters talked endlessly about how tough and unyielding they will be in the War on Terrorism--and they were rewarded with a substantial "bounce" in the polls. That makes it easy for us to say, in effect, "Now that the convention has proven that the American people want President Bush to take a strong and uncompromising approach to the War on Terrorism--when will he start doing it?"

-- Work to create a secular right.

The worst domestic threat from the Bush administration is Bush's agreement with the basic agenda of the religious right. But this would be a threat with or without Bush; he just reflects the prevailing trend of conservatism over many decades. The religious right _has_ to wield a dominant influence in the Republican Party, for the same reason that New Left nihilism has a dominant influence in the Democratic Party: it is the only movement that gives the party a foundation in fundamental moral ideas.

The main difference between the two parties, in my view, is that the Republican Party can be salvaged, but the Democratic Party cannot. The Republican Party can be salvaged because its primary selling point is a love for the American system of government and the American sense of life. The Republican Party draws a large number of "Schwarzenegger Republicans"--people who join the party for the reasons Arnold Schwarzenegger described in his speech at last week's convention: because they think the party stands for individual responsibility, free enterprise, patriotism, and a strong national defense.

Today, the only deeper foundation those people are offered for these American ideals is a religious foundation--one that ultimately leads to the opposite of the American system. We need to make a concerted effort to offer a _secular_ moral foundation for the American system. We need to work to create a secular right.

I have already announced TIA's main long-term proposal to accomplish this: the creation of a "secularism reader"--a book that will contain articles arguing for the secular foundation of American ideals, as provided in the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

As I described the basic idea behind this book in the July 26 edition of TIA Daily:

"I chose 'secularism' as the central concept of this project, because it names a crucial issue that cuts to the heart of both cultural and political issues, and that names central battles both in domestic American politics and in America's conflicts with its enemies in the Middle East.

"The theme of this book will be to show, by reference to philosophical argument, to the lessons of history, and to examples from contemporary politics, that man's most important spiritual values--epistemological certainty, moral clarity, individual rights, and an exalted view of man--require a secular foundation and are destroyed by religion rather than preserved by it. Its goal, in contradiction to Kant, is to show that freedom does not require God and that a reverence for the human spirit does not require a belief in supernatural immortality.

"This is our attempt to help defeat both the religious dogmatism of the right and the subjectivist pseudo-secularism of the left--and, more important, to defeat the idea that these are the only two choices we have."

This is the battle that we need to fight, and it is much more important than any argument over who to vote for in this election.

Here, I think we can learn a lesson from John Kerry. Kerry hoped to win this election by default. He offered no positive plan for how he would win the war or revive the economy; instead, he thought he could win by standing on the sidelines and carping at Bush, hoping that every piece of bad news would erode Bush's support and that people would turn to Kerry as the only alternative--that they would vote for him, in effect, because he was the last man on earth. That approach is now failing, as it had to.

Similarly, we cannot save America just by voting _against_ George W. Bush. The future will be determined less by how we vote on November 2 than by what we do day after day, over the next few decades, to promote the right ideas.

See also: Anti-Bushites for Bush: Bush Cannot Be Trusted to Fight the War Properly, But Kerry Can Be Trusted to Retreat