There was something moving about the fraternal intimacy that George W. Bush displayed for Jeb this week in South Carolina, but they seemed to have escalated at the moment of defeat. Photograph by Matt Rourke / AP

George W. Bush’s seclusion from the public has been so long and so complete that some, including Bush himself, have called it his “afterlife.” On Monday, for the first time in Jeb Bush’s long and troubled campaign, the former President appeared onstage alongside his younger brother, in North Charleston. Bush, who is still popular here, said he was happy to be back in South Carolina; he praised its spirit and its bacon. Then he moved to heavier themes. “I was particularly touched by the way your community banded together to comfort the victims of last year’s shooting at Mother Emanuel church, and then protest against racism and hate,” Bush said. There were a couple of proud whoops from the audience; Bush soldiered on. “I applaud your governor’s response to that tragedy,” the former President said. “And I applaud you for putting her in office.” He was speaking about Nikki Haley, a Republican of Indian descent, and her decision to take down the Confederate flag. With Donald Trump in mind, he chose to be pointed. “Thank goodness our country welcomed her parents when they immigrated here in 1969.”

The atmosphere around the Bush family during the campaign has had a finality to it, as if they were shuffling into position for a last portrait. The patriarch sat for an admiring biography by Jon Meacham in which he considered what he called “the L word,” his legacy, and in which his career was rendered as an extension of his patrician restraint. The elder son has been said to be bewildered by his Party’s radical turn. The younger son, having begun his Presidential candidacy so daintily that his own mother said he was “almost too polite” for the campaign, has now made his stand on an abhorrence of Donald Trump. “All Muslims? Seriously?” he asked during a debate. There is a theme here, conscious or not. The Bush family is trying to build its legacy not around policy but around character—a particular idea of service and rectitude, a devotion to decency in public life.

In South Carolina, the Bush brothers conducted a backstage chest bump, and the elder one took the stage to testify that his brother has the “sound judgment and good ideas” to be President, and the “backbone,” and a “strong and steady hand.” There was something moving about the fraternal intimacy—the ex-President kept referring to Jeb as “Brother”—and all this talk of character, but they seemed to have escalated at the moment of defeat. The ideas of the last two Republican Presidents are barely detectable in the primary campaign. Ted Cruz’s stump speech leans heavily on a comparison of the current moment with the election season in 1980; Donald Trump’s, with its big talk of trade wars and winning, is of the Reagan era as well. Compassionate conservatism, the last philosophy to win a Republican challenger the White House, is rarely mentioned.

George W. Bush was sent to South Carolina to capitalize on residual good feelings for him there. But that warmth did not do his brother much good. On Wednesday, Nikki Haley, the Governor whose character the elder Bush brother had celebrated, endorsed Marco Rubio. “I’m disappointed,” Jeb Bush said. At a town hall, voters started offering Bush advice on how to run his campaign. “Can you be—excuse me for saying in the vernacular—a son-of-a-bitch?” one asked. “I will be tough. I will be resolute. I will be firm,” Bush said. These effortful displays of strength have escalated recently (this week, he tweeted out a photo of a gun emblazoned with his name and captioned the image “America”) but they haven’t seemed so convincing. In the most recent national poll of Republican primary voters, by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, Bush had four-per-cent support, compared to eleven per cent for the other establishment candidate, the much more obscure Governor John Kasich, of Ohio.

Bush’s family name was always sure to pose complications; the surprise, in this campaign, has been how little direction it offered him. Jeb Bush has not often used the term “compassionate conservatism,” but he has turned to a heightened and increasingly embattled version of that idea. He defended the disabled, he gave moving accounts of his daughter’s battles with addiction, he called illegal immigration an “act of love.” But that sensitivity to suffering, which did so much to soften the Bush image in the 2000 Presidential campaign, never really cohered into a politics; the Bush White House generally turned away from it after the 9/11 attacks. The family legacy on which Jeb Bush could draw narrowed to the singular image of the decider. “A person,” George W. Bush said in praising his brother on Monday, “whose humility helps him understand what he doesn’t know and surrounds himself with people who do know what he doesn’t know.”

There is an obvious irony to this, as their own father got partway to noting, which is that George W. Bush’s record on whom he trusted, and on what he decided, was not good. The pivotal moment in Meacham’s biography of George H. W. Bush comes when the father speaks against Dick Cheney and “his own empire” that he built within his son’s White House, and blames his son for permitting this. Meacham shows the transcript to George W. Bush, who says he did not know his father felt that way. His father, he said, “would never say to me, ‘Hey, you need to rein in Cheney. He’s ruining your administration.’ ” Character was the Bush family’s chosen virtue; it was also, sometimes, their tragedy. For his father, to interfere at all, George W. Bush said, “would be out of character.”