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March 26, 2006

The Lessons of the Bush Era

Following up on the debate over whether Reagan was a better president than Bush, reader M.M. makes these astute points on Matthew Yglesias's TPM Cafe blog:

First, the difference between Bush and Reagan in domestic policy is not that Reagan was nicer, more optimistic, or more moderate. It is that in the 1980s the Democratic majority in the House curbed Reagan. Reagan was prevented from doing much of what he wanted to do, even from raising his battier ideas, by the fact of divided government and checks and balances. Republicans, on the other hand, have controlled both houses of Congress for Bush's entire term. To ignore this distinction and to credit Reagan personally for avoiding Bush's excesses is not only to overlook the excesses that did occur under Reagan; it also is to value the personal over the institutional.

Second, the difference between Bush and Reagan in foreign policy is not that Reagan's foreign policy really was not that bad, that it was not reckless and it did not aspire - with the important exception of Central America - to subvert and invade countries (check out Reagan's views on Vietnam in the '60s). The difference is that the fact of Soviet power and the structure of the Cold War exerted an inhibiting effect on Reagan's foreign policy. The Bush administration faces fewer impediments to its ambitions, allowing it to pursue projects that were inconceivable for Reagan (such as the destabilization of the Mid-East). In ignoring the constraints Reagan inherited, your critics again are privileging the personal, this time at the expense of the structural. The difference between Reagan and Bush is not Reagan's sunny disposition: it is the change in the international context.

Finally, it is silly and counter- productive of your critics to attack Bush in 2006 for personal shortcomings (incompetence, stupidity, fanaticism). Bush is all of these things, but Bush will not run for the presidency again. But Reaganism is running already. To attack Bush by letting Reaganism off the hook is not only wrong in its understanding of the 1980s versus the 2000s. It also is counterproductiv e politically. In attributing the damage Bush is causing to Bush personally, liberals not only are personalizing and trivializing the threat of the right; they also are endorsing the fundamental premises of contemporary conservatism - that Reaganism reigns supreme and, by inference, that Bush is failing because he strayed from it. The right, once again, is thinking about politics, while liberals are thinking about the personal.

I'm always a sucker for the argument that the American cult of the individual depoliticizes our discussion of politics. We blame Bush himself, instead of understanding the much more powerful institutional structures and ideological assumptions which brought him to power and will be around long after 2008.

On the flip side, I wonder if in some ways a culture can really only make sense of institutions and ideology via the language of myth - of heroes and villains.

Certainly, we can't let the right get away with turning Bush into a scapegoat, an outlier rather than the ultimate embodiment of Reaganism. That's the revisionist spadework that conservatives like Bruce Bartlett are already getting started on.

But at the same time, I think it's only natural, and perfectly justified, to also bash Bush qua Bush. That's because we want to counter the myth of Reaganism - that hodgepodge of cultural backlash, voodoo economics, and military belligerence which has sold so well in this country ever since the 1980 election - with a new, much more honest story about what conservative policies do to a country. We can call it "The Lessons of the Bush Era."

We want Bush to be for the Left today what Jimmy Carter was for the Right in the 1980s: the discrediting example of what happens when your opponent's policies are pursued.

This wasn't fair to Carter, but it was very effective politics at the time. We remember Carter more fondly today, thanks largely to his laudable post-presidential career working for the poor, for peace, and for international democracy. But through much of the '80s, his name was political poison. He was the guy who discredited the term "liberal" - even though he was far enough to the right within the party that Ted Kennedy actually challenged him from the left in the 1980 primaries.

"The Lessons of the Carter Era" with which those Reagan Republicans made so much hay in the 1980s were supposed to be that the Democrats just want to "tax and spend," and that you can never let the terrorists push you around.

Of course, Reagan ended up running the country into a deep recession which, combined with cruel cuts in social services, inflicted far more pain than the so-called "stagflation"of the Carter years. Meanwhile, he made deals under the table for hostages with Iranian terrorists, while breaking the law to secretly fund anti-Communist paramilitary terror squads in Central America.

"The Lessons of the Bush Era" will be much closer to the truth than the bogus "Lessons of the Carter Era." They should discredit the term "conservative" much the way Carter, fairly or not, discredited "liberal." They should make coming from the party of Bush strike one against every Republican politician running in every election at every level of government for the next decade.

The Republicans were handed the keys to the country by the Supreme Court in 2000. Here are the consequences of a half a decade of conservative rule:

- Our soil is attacked for the first time since 1941. Thousands of civilians are murdered after critical intelligence information warning of the attack is ignored.

- Billions and billions of dollars are transferred, through tax cuts, from the middle-class and working-class recipients of government funds and services to a small number of megamillionaires and billionaires. The resulting debt is financed by international investors who hold increasing influence over the national economy.

- Our country spreads false propaganda through all channels of American journalism and international dipolmacy in order to drum up support for an unnecessary, unwinnable war which kills thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraquis. That war is conducted in open violation of the Geneva Convention, producing anger against our country among not only Arabs throughout the Middle East, but the citizens of almost every other country on the globe.

- Our country abandons the international struggle to prevent climate change which could threaten the lives and homes of large portions of the globe's population, and which already may be responsible for a sharp upsurge in the numbers and severity of natural disasters.

- The executive branch's criminally negligent mishandling of one natural disaster results in the loss of at least 1300 lives (and perhaps many more), the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the near-destruction of one of the world's cultural treasures, the city of New Orleans.

Now, it's time to talk about "The Lessons of the Bush Era." Here's where the Left needs to figure out how to properly frame the Bush disaster, so that it ends up being not just about one man, but about everything he stands for.

Hereare some proposed "Lessons of the Bush Era." Feel free to add your own.

- Progressive taxation is the cornerstone of economic fairness.

- All Americans have a right to health care and retirement security.

- International diplomacy must always be the preferred arena for global conflict resolution.

- The government must always choose openness over secrecy.

- Public financing of campaigns is the only way to avoid the corruption of the democratic system by the wealthy.

- The president is not above the law.

Posted by tedf at March 26, 2006 05:37 PM

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