A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  But Brinkley had no such qualms, barely qualifying his ready conclusion about Bush’s place in history:

  But we live in speedy times and, the truth is, after six years in power and barring a couple of miracles, it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder.

  In February 2007, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, the newspaper with the highest circulation in the country, announced that he had reconsidered his view of Bush’s place in history. Headlined “Mea Culpa to Bush on Presidents Day,” Neuharth wrote:

  Our great country has had 43 presidents. Many very good. A few pretty bad. On Presidents Day next Monday, it’s appropriate to commemorate them all….

  A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying “this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst.”

  “She’s wrong,” I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant,

  Hoover and Richard Nixon. “It’s very unlikely Bush can crack that list,”

  I added.

  I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top….

  Bush admitting his many mistakes on Iraq and ending that fiasco might make many of us forgive, even though we can never forget the terrible toll in lives and dollars.

  The collapse of the Bush presidency brings to mind the plight of the Greek tragic figure Icarus, whose father built wings made of feathers and wax to enable them to escape from their exile on Crete. Intoxicated by hubris and uncontrollable sensations of his own potency, Icarus exceeded his limits and flew too close to the sun, which melted his wings and caused him to plunge helplessly into the sea.

  One can draw a straight line between the unprecedented heights reached by George Bush in his post-9/11 glory days and the hubris-and arrogance-driven collapse—now sustained and total—of his presidency.

  By any measure, things have not gone well for the United States over the first six years of the Bush presidency. Is there anyone who really claims otherwise? In any area, what metrics could possibly be adopted, what achievements invoked, in order to argue that the interests and welfare of America have been enhanced during this administration?

  As Brinkley points out, while Bush and Lyndon Johnson both presided over a deeply unpopular war, Johnson’s place in history is vastly improved by substantial “major domestic accomplishments to boast about when leaving the White House, such as the Civil Rights Act and Medicare/Medicaid.” By stark contrast, Brinkley pointed out, “Bush has virtually none.”

  It appears highly likely, even inevitable, that until Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009, the United States is going to be saddled with a failed president, one who is lost, aimless, weak, and isolated in the extreme. Yet he continues as inflexibly as ever to be driven by a worldview that has come to be almost universally rejected as useless, even dangerous, for dealing with the challenges facing the nation.

  A failed, lame-duck president, with nothing to lose, can either accept his impotence and passively muddle through the remainder of his term or do the opposite—move furiously forward on an extremist course, free of the constraints of facing the electorate again and convinced that he is on the side of Good and Right. Such a conviction can lead to the belief that his unpopularity is not an impediment, but a challenge, even a calling, to demonstrate his resolve and commitment by persisting even more tenaciously in the face of almost universal opposition.

  The embrace of that latter course renders public opposition and all other forms of outside pressure irrelevant, even counterproductive. It is human nature that when one is rejected and condemned by contemporary opinion, a temptation arises to reject that contemporary opinion as misguided and worthless. One instead seeks refuge in other less hostile metrics of success—universal moral standards, or the judgment of a Supreme Being, or the future vindication of history.

  It has long been evident that the president’s worldview compels such refuge. Convinced that his core beliefs are preordained as Right, he will reject any measurement that rejects his beliefs and embrace any that affirms them. What matters to him now is not the judgment of contemporary politicians, journalists, or even the majority of American voters. The rightness of his actions are determined not by public opinion polls or editorials or even empirical evidence but instead by adherence to what he perceives to be objectively moral notions of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. As the president himself has made expressly clear, his calling is to wage war against Evil on behalf of Good—as he conceives of those concepts—and he will not be deterred in that mission, not even slightly, by pragmatic impediments, whether they be political pressures, resource constraints, ongoing failures, or the objections of American citizens.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Manichean Warrior

  You know, you’ve heard me talk about this probably, but I really, truly view this as a conflict between good and evil. And there really isn’t much middle ground—like none. The people we fight are evil people….

  Either you’re with us or you’re against us. Either you’re on the side of freedom and justice or you aren’t.

  —GEORGE W. BUSH, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, January 30, 2002

  One of the aspects of the Bush presidency that has often confounded supporters and opponents alike is that George Bush’s political beliefs do not fit comfortably, or even at all, within any of the familiar, commonly assigned ideological categories. Certainly Bush is typically referred to as a conservative, and as was demonstrated in the preceding chapter, the conservative political movement claimed him as its own and was largely responsible for both his 2000 and 2004 election victories.

  Political conservatism in the United States, however, has two meanings. In one sense, it is an abstract theory of government that—in its pure, academic form—advocates various political principles. In this academic formulation, conservatism is defined by a belief in (a) restrained federal government power, (b) minimal federal taxes and responsible and limited spending, (c) a generalized distrust of the federal government and its attempts to intervene into the private lives of citizens, (d) reliance on the private sector rather than the federal government to achieve “Good” ends, (e) a preference for state and local autonomy over federalized and centralized control, (f) trusting in individuals rather than government officials to make decisions, and (g) an overarching belief in the supremacy of the rule of law.

  But the term conservatism also refers to a group of political figures and their supporters who call themselves conservatives. In this version, conservatism is defined by the actions taken and the policies implemented in reality by conservatives when they are in power rather than by what think tanks and theorists set forth as conservative principles.

  This dichotomy is not unique to conservatism. All political theories can be understood as a set of principles, or, independently, as the collection of policies and methods of governance that its adherents, in practice, undertake when in power. Communism, for instance, exists as a sterile, academic theory in the works of Karl Marx and the speeches of Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro. At that theoretical level, communism constitutes harmonious egalitarianism in which all are liberated from capitalistic enslavement and material wants, and thus are freed to pursue more elevated levels of creativity and personal fulfillment.

  But when its adherents—“Communists”—have obtained power, they have not behaved in conformity with these pretty utopian principles. They have almost uniformly imposed tyranny and wrought profound misery. The term communism, then, is not understood exclusively—or even primarily—by reference to the abstract principles defining it in books and in speeches. Rather, it is best and most commonly understood to describe the actions of Communists when in power.

  Like communism, the theory of American political “conservatism” in the pure, abstract Hayek-Goldwater sense has rarely, if ever, converged with the actions and policies of self-desc
ribed conservatives when in power. And, like communism, perhaps the very nature of theoretical conservatism means that it never can.

  Arguably, the imperatives of human nature and the instincts of government leaders—to attempt to enhance rather than restrict their own power—constitute an insurmountable barrier to the implementation of “pure” conservatism, an idealistic vision where elected government officials proceed to limit or even dismantle the mechanisms of their own power. Additionally, elected officials in the American political system must often support government programs benefiting a political movement’s constituents as a condition of retaining their power, thereby rendering the reduction, let alone the abolition, of excessive government spending virtually impossible.

  Whether political conservatism in the United States has ever really existed can be and continues to be endlessly debated. The allegedly purest form of it, as embodied by Ronald Reagan, oversaw an expansion of the power of the federal government in countless ways. That expansion of power was accompanied by wild deficit spending. The Reagan administration ushered in a significant increase in domestic discretionary spending (though far less than that which has occurred under the Bush administration). And multiple Reagan officials were indicted, and some convicted, as a result of a scandal that grew out of the administration’s violations of legal prohibitions on providing aid to the Nicaraguan contras. To be sure, Reagan paid rhetorical homage to conservative theories, but his actual governance deviated in multiple ways from those principles.

  Regardless of one’s view of that debate, it is beyond reasonable dispute that President Bush’s actions and policies deviate fundamentally, and in almost every area, from the theoretical precepts of political conservatism. Whatever one might call the set of guiding principles animating President Bush, political conservatism—at least as it exists in its storied, theoretical form—is not it.

  Since President Bush was inaugurated, discretionary domestic spending has skyrocketed, both in absolute terms and when compared to the budget-balancing Clinton administration. In 2003, the right-leaning Cato Institute published a detailed assessment of federal government spending over the preceding thirty years—entitled “‘Conservative’ Bush Spends More Than ‘Liberal’ Presidents Clinton, Carter.” It concluded:

  But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively….

  After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush’s three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.

  Those profligate spending patterns only worsened as the Bush presidency proceeded. In 2005, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published a study by its own Veronique de Rugy and Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie. The report was entitled “Bush the Budget Basher” and concluded: “After five years of Republican reign, it’s time for small-government conservatives to acknowledge that the GOP has forfeited its credibility when it comes to spending restraint.”

  President Bush has not only violated every claimed tenet of conservatism when it comes to restraints on federal spending, but he ranks among the most fiscally reckless presidents in modern times—so insists the pro-Bush AEI:

  “After 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared [the budget] down pretty good,” Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) crowed a few weeks back during ongoing budget deliberations. But nothing could be farther from the truth, at least since the GOP gained the White House in 2001.

  During his five years at the helm of the nation’s budget, the president has expanded a wide array of “compassionate” welfare-state, defense, and nondefense programs. When it comes to spending, Bush is no Reagan. Alas, he is also no Clinton and not even Nixon. The recent president he most resembles is in fact fellow Texan and legendary spendthrift Lyndon Baines Johnson—except that Bush is in many ways even more profligate with the public till.

  These massive spending increases are entirely independent of any 9/11-related or defense-based expenditures: “When homeland security spending is separated out, the increase in discretionary spending is still huge: 36 percent on Bush’s watch,” according to the AEI. During the Bush presidency, total real discretionary outlays increased by 35.8 percent. By comparison, the same figure increased by only 11.2 percent during the deficit-plagued Reagan administration, and during the budget-balancing Clinton administration, it decreased by 8.2 percent. All of this led the AEI report to conclude: “It seems incontestable that we should conclude that the country’s purse is worse off when Republicans are in power.”

  The Bush administration has also repeatedly asserted the prerogatives of federal power in areas traditionally reserved to the states. It has, for instance, sought to eliminate the right of the states to enact laws governing marriage, assisted suicide, and the use of medical marijuana. In each of those areas, various states have enacted laws—in some instances by referenda—that President Bush disliked. As a result, the Bush administration fought to override the judgment of the states by federalizing those issues and imposing the policy preferences of the president as a uniform, compulsory standard, which no state was to be free to reject. Hence: No gay marriage. No physician-assisted suicide. No permitting terminally ill individuals to obtain prescriptions for marijuana to treat their afflictions or alleviate their symptoms.

  The Bush administration’s disdain for the ostensibly conservative belief in limited federal power and the sanctity of states’ rights became most apparent in the case of Terri Schiavo. A lifelong Republican and Southern Baptist state court judge had been presiding over the Schiavo matter for several years, faithfully applying clear Florida state law to resolve the battle between Schiavo’s husband and her parents as to what end-of-life decisions would be made about Schiavo. Florida appellate courts upheld virtually all of that judge’s substantive rulings.

  But the outcome of those state judicial proceedings deviated from the president’s moral preferences and those of his “conservative” Congressional allies. As a result, in an atmosphere of intense drama, Congress enacted and the president signed “emergency” legislation vesting authority in the federal courts to override the judgment of the Florida courts. Wielding the tools of federal power, they sought to take it upon themselves to resolve the end-of-life issues faced by Terri Schiavo’s family, issues that were controlled by clear Florida law.

  The list of the Bush administration’s systematic deviations from fundamentally “conservative principles” (as they exist in theory) is too lengthy to chronicle here. Suffice it to say, while the Bush presidency is consistent with the actual decisions and policies of previous “conservative” politicians, a belief in conservative theories of government is plainly not what has guided the president or his administration.

  MORALISM TRUMPS CONSERVATISM

  That political conservatism (in its theoretical sense) has not been the North Star of the Bush presidency defies reasonable dispute. That reality leads to the question, What does drive the president? When aggregated, the Bush administration’s actions, policies, and political arguments can appear jumbled and incoherent, bereft of a philosophical center. But the opposite is true. At the heart of the Bush presidency exists a coherent worldview, one the president has applied with exceptional consistency and unyielding conviction.

  Many Bush critics, and even some of his supporters, have long depicted the president as
a weak and malleable individual—more of an aimless figurehead than a resolute leader—whose actions are the by-product not of personal agency but manipulation and control by advisers shrewder and more willful than he. But that portrayal is pure mythology, for which there is virtually no support.

  It is certainly true that throughout his presidency, Bush has relied heavily on advisers who focus on details, has delegated even significant tasks to aides, and has trusted those around him to inform him of critical matters and to educate him on issues about which he knew little. In those regards, his reliance on his advisers and top aides is substantial. But when the president, in a mid-2006 press conference, anointed himself as “the Decider,” it struck many as arrogant, but few as inaccurate: George Bush’s strong personality traits and deeply held personal beliefs have, more than anything else, defined and propelled the Bush presidency.

  In his book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, Bush speechwriter David Frum recounted several incidents early on in the Bush presidency, even prior to the 9/11 attacks, in which an engaged, aggressive, and even sometimes shrewd George Bush left no doubt that he was in charge, that he was the Decider well before he coined that term. After describing a meeting in which the president was particularly decisive and calculating, Frum concluded:

  In that hour, Bush had settled one thing in my mind: I could never again take seriously the theory that somebody else was running this administration—not Cheney, not Rove, not Card. Bush was leading us all right—but where was he leading us all to?

  As is true with any decision-maker, those close to the president are able to exert influence over his decisions by molding their advice to comport with the president’s worldview, thereby enhancing the likelihood that the president will find their recommended course of action persuasive. The president’s advisers certainly are aware of the president’s impulses and belief system and conform their cases accordingly. Nonetheless, each defining aspect of the administration—the policies it has undertaken, its interaction with the outside world, and the manner in which decisions are made—has been shaped and determined by the worldview and personal leadership attributes of the president himself. As a result, all of the seemingly disparate component parts and disconnected events of the Bush administration have a common origin.