As opposed to Bush, the ultimate evildoer, that is. That was the headline over a recent Huffington Post huff-and-post by a sitcom producer named Peter Mehlman, which will go down in history as some sort of perfect example of historical cluelessness circa 2007.
But we're surrounded by such statements-- the blogs here present this morning another one, in a quoted piece by the paleo-right off-the-deep-ender Paul Craig Roberts: "In the administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has achieved the greatest combination of idiocy and evil in human history."
Suffice it to say that Chairman Mao is no doubt astonished to find the famine of the Great Leap Forward surpassed so quickly, and with so little reporting of Americans eating their babies to survive.
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The Weekly Standard, one of those agents of evil run by the Satanic Rupert Murdoch and thus read by no one here, has an excellent cover story by Noemie Emery on the hysteria that leads people who presumably are only partly, not completely, ignorant of history to portray the garden variety presidency of George W. Bush as something to make Ming the Merciless blanch. It's well worth reading in full, but here's a taste of the argument:
The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit. To them, as to most reasonable observers, the White House shows the chronic fatigue of a two-term presidency reaching its final year. Nonetheless, paranoia about what Bush and Co. are up to preys on the minds of many progressives, who have progressed, in this case at least, beyond reason...
Ask those who see plots what they think they are fighting, and it will not be anything small. They see themselves locked in an end-of-times struggle, defending the full range of Enlightenment values against a rogue clique made up of backward fanatics, bent upon snuffing them out. And who are these dangerous extremists? For a deep cultural explanation, let us turn to the prolific author and Washington think-tanker Michael Lind, whose neglected 2004 classic, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, uncovered the Texan conspiracy to bring back the Confederacy, complete with slave labor. The president, you see, was "born in New Haven, Connecticut, but reared in the reactionary culture of Anglo-Southern West Texas," and as a result is heir not to the parties of Lincoln or of either Roosevelt, but to the segregationists of the Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan eras, and longing to turn the clock back to their day....
Against this indictment of Bush (and his father), Lind has kind things to say of a few other Texans, among them Lyndon B. Johnson (who appears here as a gentle and modest transplanted Midwesterner) and the notorious moonbat H. Ross Perot. Johnson, too, is a creature of the land he grew up on, in his case the Hill Country, a small chunk of Eden inside the Hell that is Texas, "an island of intellect." As Lind puts it, "Bush is a product of the Deep South traditions of the cotton plantation country .??.??. while Lyndon Johnson grew up in a region shaped by German-American Unionism, liberalism, and anti-slavery sentiment," in which the "German Texans did not despise leisure or learning. Their beer gardens rang with the melodies of their singing-clubs," and they replaced the other Texans' favorite pastime of lynching with reading and writing and song. If this sounds unlike the LBJ of history--rather more like his antithesis, Eugene McCarthy--rest assured that it gets even better. Another hero of reason is H. Ross Perot. "To Perot, the high-tech populist, the Bushes were upper-class parasites enriching themselves through the exploitation of riches that should have benefited all Texans. .??.??. Perot hated the Bushes and the Bakers in the way that Juan Perón, another modernizing tribune of the masses .??.??. once hated the Anglophile oligarchs of the Buenos Aires Jockey Club."
This explains everything: LBJ as a scholarly German-American, Juan Perón as a model reformer, and George Bush the elder as a would-be Confederate general. If you buy Perot (and Perón) as democratic reformers, you will surely buy George W. Bush as an arch-segregationist, trying to bring back the Glorious Cause.
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Emery neatly eviscerates several such examples of DaVinci Code-level historical analysis from everyone from Mark Crispin Miller to Naomi Wolf to Al "My earth tones are in balance" Gore himself. It's a fun read, as any piece in which the Buenos Aires Jockey Club becomes the key to recent American history is bound to be.
But I wish Emery had expanded upon the analysis of why Bush-haters have such a need to overdramatize their policy differences into a life and death struggle between the Empire and the rebels on Tattooine. There's a perfectly reasonable case to be made that Bush is a bungler and a maker of messes the next president will be forced to clean up; why is it psychologically necessary to gild this lily in Nazi red and black?
The reason, I think, is that 9-11 itself defined our politics as a struggle against fascists-- religious fascists who cut off hands and heads, force girls to remain ignorant and confined to quarters, blow up statues and buses and buildings full of people. The side of our politics that believes in a full-fledged fight against such totalitarians thus has all the internal support and righteousness afforded to anyone in a life-or-death struggle for one's own freedom and way of life.
The side that doesn't want to take the fight to such an enemy in aggressive military terms is left with what, emotionally, feels like weaker tea. Chomskian arguments of blowback and cycles of violence may seem to have intellectual heft, and obviously such people congratulate themselves on seeing the situation more rationally and perceptively-- but they don't satisfy like a cry to war against the brutish invader does.
So George W. Bush, no more fascist or imperialist or war-mad a president than, say, Woodrow Wilson, is blown up into an even bigger totalitarian than Bin Laden, in order that the Left can share in the struggle against fascism-- by finding its own fascist to struggle against. And thus they too enjoy the self-dramatizing satisfaction of knowing that they're just as tough and cool under fire and engaged in the great struggle of our times as Rudy or any other rightwing hero. Clinton whined that he was never tested by anything big enough to make him a great president; no such whine is heard from anyone who has convinced himself that Bush is worse than Hitler and his sharing in the groupthink of liberal society is an act of profound, White Rose-level courage.
Alas, January 21, 2009 will bring disappointment to such people, when Bush, unlike Hitler or the reformer Juan Peron, will hand the football and the ceremonial pens to the next guy, revealing how overwrought all this hysteria was. But the true hystericist never looks back; there's always another election being stolen by Diebold, another war being cooked up by the Trilateral Commission or the secret Masonic council that runs everything.
Historical parallels are never exact, so don't take the punchline too literally, but I am reminded by this of a mordant comment on a blog which seems to sum this attitude up perfectly: "The Left today is made up of people congratulating themselves that if they'd been alive in the 1930s, they'd have had the guts to stand up... to Churchill."
