After Bush

Nobody gave me a review copy of Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy so I guess I'm going to have to go buy a copy. It has, already, however, started to spawn some interesting commentary. I think Matt Stoller, for one, is right to see how transient the current eclipse of Bushism is:

The fight over Bush's Presidency is ongoing, with a possible war with Iran in the cards. But even if we manage to prevent that war, the 'stabbed in the back' canard, which is extremely powerful, will be used to resurrect the conservative movement nearly instantaneously. That's why when Bush leaves office, the fight over his legacy will be ongoing, until the movement that put him there is fully discredited.

This is quite true. Matt's attitude, I suspect, is that progressives need to steel themselves for ferocious political combat, which is probably true. It also highlights, however, the need for ideas about national security with a little more depth and staying power than thin critiques of Bush's "competence" or his contracting policies but which actually leave much of his overarching theory unchallenged.

Comments

I suspect you'll be more sympathetic to limits on the number of free review copies in a few months time ...

Posted by otto | June 26, 2007 7:38 AM

The likelihood that the 'eclipse of Bushism' is merely transient is what made Soros call for 'deNazification' of US society, admittedly a poor choice of words, but accurately expressing the need to make US society confront the failures of its nationalism and militarism, and to attack US institutions which prop up that nationalism and militarism.

(Soros's quote: "America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process.")

I'm still thinking about what concretely might be done in this direction.

Posted by otto | June 26, 2007 8:01 AM

Hard core conservatives really do have a different mindset. They believe that Vietnam could have been won, not just that we're winning the Iraq war.

Posted by stm177 | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM

I remember reading how Bush could never accept losing in sports. When he would lose in tennis, he would yell "best three out of five" and wouldn't let his opponent leave until they stopped trying and he won. He once sucker-punched a future lawyer at Yale during a pickup basketball game and got his ass beat. No wonder the base loves him. They aren't man enough to ever just admit their own failures and move on. A couple years ago there was a Foreign Affairs article by one of Nixon's point men on Vietnam talking about how we were winning in Vietnam before the funds were cut off. Considering how Vietnam became pretty much what they were trying to make it - pretty much authoritarian, but open for business - you would think they could just declare victory and go home. (Instead, one of his bits of evidence was that the Soviets were annoyed with the North Vietnamese. If the North Vietnamese refused to be a simple proxy for the Soviets, then the Vietnam War wasn't an extension of the Cold War, which was supposed to be about checking the spread of Soviet power. After all, it was Nixon and Kissinger who finally realized at the top levels of American government that China and the USSR were not the same country.)

Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:43 AM

I'm still thinking about what concretely might be done in this direction.

The next DoJ should spend a lot of time prosecuting Bush Administration crimes, to begin with.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 26, 2007 8:53 AM

Second Matt Weiner. I fear that Democrats will be reconciliatory when they take back the whitehouse.

I am not interested in a witch hunt, but there should be a thorough investigation of everything the Bush administration did to get us into this position, and any crimes that are uncovered should be prosecuted severely as an example that we are srious about accountability.

Posted by theCoach | June 26, 2007 9:41 AM

Absolutely this is going to be the subtext of the next Presidency if a Democrat wins. However, we should remember we still need to win that fight, which is not a sure thing, before we can move on to the post-script.

Posted by AJ | June 26, 2007 10:28 AM

1) To defeat Bushism (actually "Cheneyism") will require a new third party. Because the people Cheney rolled most of all were the Democratic leadership.

2) Everyone in Washington DC KNEW Bush was lying re the causes behind the Sept 11 attack. That we were attacked because the psychotic "Islamofascists" "hate our freedom".

But everyone cooperated in allowing that lie to persist and to become accepted history. Because to challenge that lie -- to have exposed the greedy predations that are provoking the growith of terrorism in the Islamic world -- would have required challenging not only Big Oil and Big Defense but also challenging the billionaire supporters of Israel who provide much of the funding for Democratic politicans.

3) All the malign effects of the Bush administration -- $4 Trillion stolen from Social Security/Medicare, thousands dead in an unnecessary war in Iraq, a growing Cold War with the rest of the major powers, the defacto scrapping of the Bill of Rights, a slide down the slope into a global empire ruled by a militaristic dictatorship -- sprung from that initial lie.

4) The Democratic leadership can never really challenge Cheneyism -- because Bush/Cheney's lie is theirs as well. They are accomplices.

5) If you are part of a bank robbery gang and a gang member murders someone during a robbery, then you are guilty as an accomplice. You can never go to the police. You in fact must help the actual murderer --lest his capture expose your own involvement.

Posted by Don Williams | June 26, 2007 11:40 AM

First of all, "conservative" is the wrong word.

Conservatives like Pat Buchanan have been far more courageous in challenging the Bush/Cheney push for global empire than the Democratic leadership. Greenwald is using "conservative" in the same way Ann Coulter uses the world "liberal"

Neocon or Bushite is the correct word.

"Republican" also is the correct word but Democratic politicans NEVER criticize "Republicans" during election season --because they hope to pull Republican voters over to their side.

The way to deal with Bushites' "stab in the back" meme is to show that it is Bushites themselves who have viciously stabbed America in the back -- in corrupt pursuit of self interest.

It would take what .. $20 Million .. to mail a letter to most US households documenting in detail exactly what Bushites have done. By "Bushite", I don't just mean Bush/Cheney or members of their administration. I mean all those people who helped them deceive American. Rush Limbaugh. Bill O'Reilly. Ann Coulter. Glenn Reynolds.

If that was done, Bushites would not be worrying about whether they will prevail in the next election -- they would be worrying about whether the American people will throw Bushites up against a wall and blow their brains out with shotguns.

Posted by Don Williams | June 26, 2007 11:54 AM

IMO, Bush and "Bushism" is finished. Which does not mean that the GOP or conservatism is finished of course. What will happen once Bush leaves office is that the GOP and the conservative movement will do their best to induce public amnesia about him and, where they can't get away with that, they will join the chorus denouncing him. Of course they will do so in a way that blames everything on Bush (and Cheney, Karl Rove et al) and none of it on their own idelogy. In fact, we are already seeing the beginnings of this process with various conservatives arguing that Bush was never a conservative to begin with. As for Iraq, they will split the diferrence with the argument that we could have won there, but that Bush's incompetence doomed the enterprise.
Of the French Bourbons it was once said (after their brief Restoration) that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. Our rightwing has certainly learned nothing (except maybe that being an ex-president's son is not a sufficient qualification for office) but they will be forgetting Bush and trying to make the rest of us share that forgetting.

Posted by JonF | June 26, 2007 12:13 PM

To defeat Bushism (actually "Cheneyism") will require a new third party. Because the people Cheney rolled most of all were the Democratic leadership.

Well then, we're doomed. Because the way elections are won, or rather, how they're lost, in this country, as established by Democracy version 1.0 back in 1789, third parties are up against a nearly vertical rockface they have to climb if they want to prevail. Ross Perot was the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in our history, and actually prevented either of the other major candidates from getting a majority of the vote, but on the day after the election, he had gained zero power from it. In a system that granted coalition-forming power to people in Perot's position, he would have been able to tap either Bush or Clinton into power, and could have had a good deal of influence. But under Democracy 101, coalitions are formed before, not after, the election, and if you aren't with the winning side, you simply lose.

A third or fourth party might be able to create a space for itself at the local and state levels, possibly then gaining influence in Federal legislative races, and maybe creating a third viable caucus in Congress. Until something like that happens, the duopoly is the state of the world, no matter how much Ralph Nader bangs his little fists.

The Neocons didn't form a third party, they took over an existing one. That's how it's done, apparently.

As for the disappointing Demo leadership, yes, they seem unable to learn that auto-castration isn't much of a winning strategy, except that it pays pretty well for party operatives. Still, the trouble is less that these particular leaders are especially bad than it is that the rank and file continue to let them get away with their BS. The way forward is at the grassroots level, and unfortunately, is very labor intensive.

-F.

Posted by Fingal | June 26, 2007 1:13 PM

Arrrggh!

- But under Democracy 101
+ But under Democracy 1.0

Posted by Fingal | June 26, 2007 1:32 PM

Well, autocastration keeps the Democratic campaign consultants in clover. That's why they keep demanding it over and over again.

And maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't see how the debacle in Iraq is going to turn out badly for the Republican Party. All they need to do is re-run the same stab-in-the-back culture war that they used to return to power at the end of the 1970s. It was what, four years between Nixon's resignation and the passing of Prop. 13 in California? By 2009, 2010 at the latest, we'll be seeing articles about the resurgence in the conservative movement spurred on, in part, by "the way the liberals mistreated our boys when they came back from Iraq."

In three years time, the whole misunderstanding about the Maine Troop Greeters will have morphed inside the noise machine into a narrative where "liberals" oppressed patriotic citizens trying to give cookies to soldiers.

No, in a country where more people know the name of Ana Nicole Smith's baby than the Secretary of the Treasury, it won't be hard to rewrite even the most recent of history.

Posted by jlw | June 26, 2007 2:01 PM

Also, by 2010, I expect we'll be seeing the resurgence of the rural-Southern-sheriff-taking-on-the-hippies movies, suitably updated. Buford Pusser is gonna kick some visiting professor of multicultural studies butt.

Posted by jlw | June 26, 2007 2:20 PM

This is, in fact, much more important than which party wins the White House. A clear repudiation of the authoritarian and incompetent approach to government is more important than, say, any particular package of policies or party affiliation. It just so happens that none of the Republicans running (with the possible exception of Ron Paul) would provide such a repudiation; but that's a contingent fact and not a logically necessary one.

Posted by fzz | June 26, 2007 5:43 PM

Re "It just so happens that none of the Republicans running (with the possible exception of Ron Paul) would provide such a repudiation "
-------
But what is truly sad is that it increasingly appears as if none of the Democratic presidential candidates will either. With the possible exception of Bill Richardson and Barack Obama.

Posted by Don Williams | June 26, 2007 8:59 PM