The looming Bush hangover
posted by Liberal Eagle at 1:02 PM
My posting's been light, and I'm back down to one IDT comic a week lately, because I'm facing a bit of a political identity crisis.
In a way I've come of age politically during the Bush years. I read stuff I wrote on the subject in the 90s, when I fancied myself a bubbling fountain of youthful political insight, and it all seems like a shallow, totally unnecessary regurgitation of 90s conventional wisdom. Newt Gingrich overreached! Impeachment is a bad idea! Deng Xiaopang opened China up to capitalism! The Reform Party is funny!
The Bush era has been different. The media conventional wisdom was wrong. Everyone but a few of us went temporarily batshit insane. In 2000 the media and the public seemed to believe the presidency was a fundamentally unimportant office so we may as well hold a giant popularity contest and oh isn't Al Gore a big annoying dork for actually knowing about policy. Let's put that affable George in, he'll be more fun at parties! And then 9/11 and the media propping Bush up as the Decider in the Flight Suit for the next several years.
And, ironically given this worldview is one of my biggest criticisms of Bush, it became temporarily useful to divide the world into good vs. evil. Because they had to be stopped, and I lost sleep for years worrying that they would win, and they often did.
But we had to fight. Nuance could go by the wayside. No point in rearranging the furniture when the house is on fire.
I know I'm not alone in this. Among other things, there's this Salon.com article by Gary Kamiya:
That's what worries me, in a nutshell. Well, maybe not even worries, but it's a looming adjustment I know I'd better start making. I've come of age as a political thinker in a historically unique era (at least I hope I have, because I honestly don't think the country could survive another one like this any time soon--it's almost destroyed what we are, as it is). The skills appropriate to it--mostly hammering at power by exercising common sense, which almost always meant simply disagreeing with the mind-bendingly horrible policy the administration was pushing, and then explaining why--will be less useful in an era when the government, again, has some policies I like, and some I don't, and shades of gray come into existence again.
And we'll have to learn things like debate, again. The narrative will no longer be good vs. evil.
As a political commentator I'll have to change, because I'm very aware that this bag of tools isn't the right one for an Obama presidency, or another Clinton presidency, or probably even a Giuliani presidency.
There is some soul-searching to be done. I'm not sure how to approach it.
In a way I've come of age politically during the Bush years. I read stuff I wrote on the subject in the 90s, when I fancied myself a bubbling fountain of youthful political insight, and it all seems like a shallow, totally unnecessary regurgitation of 90s conventional wisdom. Newt Gingrich overreached! Impeachment is a bad idea! Deng Xiaopang opened China up to capitalism! The Reform Party is funny!
The Bush era has been different. The media conventional wisdom was wrong. Everyone but a few of us went temporarily batshit insane. In 2000 the media and the public seemed to believe the presidency was a fundamentally unimportant office so we may as well hold a giant popularity contest and oh isn't Al Gore a big annoying dork for actually knowing about policy. Let's put that affable George in, he'll be more fun at parties! And then 9/11 and the media propping Bush up as the Decider in the Flight Suit for the next several years.
And, ironically given this worldview is one of my biggest criticisms of Bush, it became temporarily useful to divide the world into good vs. evil. Because they had to be stopped, and I lost sleep for years worrying that they would win, and they often did.
But we had to fight. Nuance could go by the wayside. No point in rearranging the furniture when the house is on fire.
I know I'm not alone in this. Among other things, there's this Salon.com article by Gary Kamiya:
Hating George W. Bush sometimes feels like a full-time job. I get up in the morning, open the paper, and it's Bush World. His ruinous handiwork is all over the place, whether it's Putin threatening to start a new Cold War, another Neanderthal anti-Enlightenment skirmish in the U.S. or some fresh hell in Baghdad. I turn on the TV and there he is, uttering reality-averse platitudes while mangling the English language in his best frat-boy twang. And then there's the Internet, where my bookmarked band of rhetorical assassins stir facts and commentary about his wretched tenure into a damning cocktail that I happily imbibe.
...
Maybe we Bush-haters are extreme and obsessive. But Bush made us this way. We didn't want to hate the guy -- he left us no choice. And the respectable people calling for us to calm down and go to our rooms are the same good Germans who somehow didn't notice he was taking us down the garden path to hell.
...
One of the consequences of living under a dreadful president like Bush is that you start magically thinking that getting rid of him will solve everything. You start believing if it weren't for Bush, the glaciers would not be melting, the Democrats would grow a spine and Bible-thumping reactionaries would be reading Bertrand Russell. Alas, the day after the Bush-countdown keychain becomes a collector's item, these things will still all be true.
So we will have to recalibrate our brains, learn how to make finer distinctions, be less Manichaean in our judgments. Bush has been so egregious, such a cardboard villain, that he has made us intellectually lazy -- just about anything he is for, you know you're probably going to be against. This is not exactly training to run an intellectual triathlon. Whoever succeeds him is going to be good in some ways, not so good in other ways. The knee-jerk response was appropriate to Bush -- his entire presidency consisted of whacking the national patella with a huge hammer. But it won't make sense anymore. We're going to have to learn to work with gray, not black and white.
That's what worries me, in a nutshell. Well, maybe not even worries, but it's a looming adjustment I know I'd better start making. I've come of age as a political thinker in a historically unique era (at least I hope I have, because I honestly don't think the country could survive another one like this any time soon--it's almost destroyed what we are, as it is). The skills appropriate to it--mostly hammering at power by exercising common sense, which almost always meant simply disagreeing with the mind-bendingly horrible policy the administration was pushing, and then explaining why--will be less useful in an era when the government, again, has some policies I like, and some I don't, and shades of gray come into existence again.
And we'll have to learn things like debate, again. The narrative will no longer be good vs. evil.
As a political commentator I'll have to change, because I'm very aware that this bag of tools isn't the right one for an Obama presidency, or another Clinton presidency, or probably even a Giuliani presidency.
There is some soul-searching to be done. I'm not sure how to approach it.
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