Or at least that’s what Jody Bottum suggests in this article on the President’s inagural speech:

No, President Bush’s opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk–about everything. With his inaugural address, President Bush has just delivered a foreign-policy discourse that relies entirely on classical concepts of natural law, and, agreeing or not, everybody in America understood what he was talking about.

In other words, the argument over abortion changed the way the nation speaks of every moral issue. “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies,” the president declares–and thereby carries natural law out to the world.

This is a claim about the universal, which the old foreign-policy realists rejected. This is a claim about the moral, which the libertarians despised. And this is a claim about the eternal, which the Social Darwinists renounced. But these older strains of conservatism have lost the battle to set the nation’s rhetoric. They are welcome to come along for the ride, but George W. Bush announced, there in the bright cold of a Washington January, that the nation would be moving to the beat of a different political philosophy.

The older conservative tradition, when it was influenced by Christian thought, tended to emphasize the fallenness of humankind, and the limits that imposed on our ability to reconstruct the social order according to some kind of abstract pattern. Bush’s vision (to the extent it really is his vision) seems to lack that older pessimism and skepticism about the limits of human power, and that’s what worries me.