The Uniquely awful presidency of George W Bush

George W. Bush is back in the news with the opening of his presidential library (when did these become a thing, anyway?).  There have been some weak attempts to defend him, and more repetitions of what we already know -- that George W. Bush was a poor president that made bad decisions, a man so obsessed with being 'the decider' that he banished any of the doubt and self-reflection needed for serious decision making*.

I've been returning to something that the great, curmudgeonly historian David Foner said -- that George W. Bush was the worst president ever.  Now I didn't think that then and I don't think that now -- we've had more wicked presidents (Jackson) and presidents that have presided over (and helped create) greater national disasters (Hoover, Buchanan).

But there is a narrow sense in which I think Bush is 'the worst ever' -- never before has a president -created- so many problems without any need or excuse.  Never before has a president been given such a strong hand -- a budget surplus, international leadership both moral and political -- and squandered it so completely, leaving us with financial collapse, trillion-dollar deficits, a misbegotten and mismanaged war, and Abu Ghraib.  The other presidential failures -- Hoover and Buchanan come to mind -- were given great challenges and failed spectacularly.  George W. Bush was given one significant but manageable challenge - 9-11 - and failed badly, and then he conjured up more failures (deficits, Katrina's aftermath) from thin air and sheer incompetence.


I've studied a bit of American history, and I think this is unique.  Other presidents (Nixon, Jefferson) mixed unforced errors with brilliant accomplishments, while others (Adams) had brilliant accomplishments amidst general incompetence.  George W. Bush doesn't just belong aside Harding and Filmore amongst the mediocre presidents, he belongs at the bottom of them all, circling the drain with Buchanan and Hoover.

*This probably has a bit to do with his MBA education and his stints in the corporate world, honestly.

Violence and the Divided American Left

A handful of rather dim anarchists apparently tried to blow up a bridge near Cleaveland.  Thankfully they failed, not that they were likely to succeed.

This headline makes me think of something I've been thinking about for some time -- the huge divide in the American left between Anarchist radicals (like those accused in this case) and everyone else.  It is a divide that encompasses the difference between violent rioting (or even terrorism) and non-violence, but it goes much deeper, into the fundamentals of the ideology.

Put simply, there is no 'American Left' but a mish-mashed collection of the 'Progressives' (those to the left of Obama, lets say) and the 'Revolutionaries', who are mostly anarchists of some stripe.  The 'Progressives' believe what most liberal  democrats do, just more so.  They want single-payer healthcare, strong environmental protections, more equality for women and minorities (via non-discrimination enforcement and other means) and that sort of thing.  If you were to turn the Democratic party's platform up to 10, you'd get at what they believe.  The Revolutionaries, on the other hand, want to dismantle capitalism and the American system of government.  They don't want single-payer healthcare or other governmental programs, but either a collection of anarcho-syndicalist collectives or primitive tribes.  Not surprisingly, the progressives generally prefer  the electoral process and peaceful protest and the revolutionaries are more willing to embrace violence.  The violent ones seem to be a fairly small minority of the Revolutionary Left in America, but in the end the only difference between a nonviolent anarchist and a violent one is which one is holding the molotov cocktail (this is, needless to say, a big difference); theirs is only a disagreement about tactics.  Progressives, on the other hand, disagree with revolutionaries about just about everything.

The NRA -- another arm of the Republican Party

The Daily Dish has a post* about the NRA's dedicated campaign against the democratic party, out of all proportion to Democrat's actual views on gun control (mostly, they don't care anymore -- gun control seems  less important than it did during the murder explosion of 1984-1994).  I have little to add, other than to say that it is  true in my experience as well.  Moreover, I feel like the NRA has gotten more partisan after Heston handed off the reigns to Wayne LaPierre -- rather than being a single-issue lobby it seems like another arm of the republican party, dedicated to marshalling gun owners to support Republican causes.  And, of course, enrich the NRA's own coffers.

*This is another good article.

The Enemy is Us

Over the past 10 years, the NYPD has shot a number of unarmed (black) men, beat up protestors just for the heck of it, blacked out the media from lower Manhattan, prevented protests from even occurring at the 2004 Republican convention, stopped and frisked untold thousands of people of color without probable cause, gotten their buddies off of parking tickets and then protested when they were censured for it, and now has  spied on muslims across state lines for no reason aside form their religion.

And the end result? The NYPD is pretty popular.

To me this illustrates the greatest threat to Liberty -- that the American people will simply hand it over to 'trusted' institutions like the police and the military, partly out of fear for our safety and partly because sentimental regard for those who 'put themselves in harm's way for us' makes criticizing them seem gauche.  And why should we not?  Most Americans will never have a particularly adverse encounter with a police officer, and the vast majority have nothing to fear from Guantanamo or wire taps.  Those who suffer under the heel of these infractions are minorities people neither like nor trust, so in the end the mass of the American people (the white mass) lose nothing personally when the security forces trample the rights of some brown people.

This is all old hat.  Tocqueville predicted as much with his memorable coinage 'the tyranny of the majority.'  It has been with us in some form since before Andrew Jackson made it an integral part of American politics with his white man's Democracy.

And yet, frustratingly, our cultural discourse doesn't have an expression for this threat.  It is all around us and yet movies and films do not warn of the People, but of select cabals that control things behind the scenes.  Pop culture is stuck in the anti-establishment politics of the 70's, despite the fact that American politics has moved on.  The bad guys in some of the great sci-fi TV of our time - "Firefly," "The X-Files" are behind-the-scenes conspiracies, not the indifferent populace.

Perhaps as my generation comes of age we will see pop culture that reflects the crises of our time and not those of the watergate era.  I can only hope.  We need a new narrative for new concerns, not one left over from our parents'.

PS: If anyone can think of some great anti-populist media, I'm all ears

Contraception and Catholicism, Continued - The Anti-Americanism of the Catholic Hierarchy

Catholicism has, over the course of American History, become a vital part of the American landscape.  From the Catholic founding father Charles Carroll and his cousin Bishop John Carroll (an early supporter of a vernacular Mass) to President Kennedy, Catholicism made a claim to be a faith compatible with American ideals, and over a century and more it proved itself to be so.

A separation between Church and state came to be welcomed as it allowed Catholics to send their children to Catholic schools, rather than the de-facto protestant state-run schools found in places like Massachusetts.  American Catholics embraced democracy and the democratic process, rather than opposing it like many in Europe, who viewed republicanism as inherently anti-clerical.  American Catholic churches featured greater lay participation in their management as well.*  The Catholic Hierarchy objected to a number of these views, characterizing the American church's tendencies as the heresy of "Americanism", and tried off and on to bring the American church more in line with Rome.**