(Boston, June 26, 2034) -- Pulitizer Prize-winning historian Isadora Tribe's much-awaited "The Restoration Years: America in the Post-Bush Era" jumped to the top of the best-seller lists almost immediately. The Harvard professor and I spoke in her Cambridge home about the revelations in that volume.
BW: Why don't we start with the title of the book? Why "Restoration"?
Tribe: George Bush the Younger, as many may remember, was, in historical terms, a kind of usurper of the crown. Not only was he installed into power and "re-elected" by fraudulent means, but he was, how shall we say, a bit over his head in the job. He knew nothing, he didn't want to know anything, he ignored those who did know something. In short, he surrounded himself mainly with incompetents and mean-spirited ideologues like himself, and tried to keep all his administration's outrageous behaviors totally secret from any meaningful oversight.
The reason why Bush was adjudged widely as "the worst president ever," even during his tenure, was a direct result of his years of unnecessary wars and chaos, bungling on a monstrous scale, the mangling of the Constitution, ideological extremism, and out-and-out corruption and larceny. In other words, he and his cronies laid waste to the institutions of our democratic republic.
When he was finally gone, nothing less than a thoroughgoing cleansing of the foul-smelling stable was in order. That was "The Restoration" era, years of undoing the great damage his administration has foisted on the country. Restoring our country's commitment to Constitutional rule and to sanity and realism in our foreign policy -- that was the Herculean job of his successors.
THE GOOD, BAD & UGLY
BW: That sounds so harsh. Don't you have anything good to say about the man and his administration?
Tribe: One shouldn't ignore the possibility that Bush sincerely believed himself to be, or at least convinced himself that he was, operating for the "good of the country." But even if one accepts that possibility, rather than out-and-out moral corruption and hunger for power, Bush's definitions of "good" and "country" flowed so narrowly out of such a circumscribed class-stratum, education, and limited experiences, that they bore little relevance to how almost everyone else interpreted those terms.
So the short answer to your question is no. History and his own contemporaries judged him to be so reckless and incompetent with the power at his command that he brought the United States into severe disrepute around the globe. He nearly wrecked the economy in the process, laying humongous debts on succeeding generations. Even his own party's leaders and members of Congress deserted him in his final years in office, feeling he did great damage to the country's vital interests. History has rendered its judgement: His administration was an ugly stain on our country's garment of decency.
BW: I seem to recall that even in his worst times toward the end, he still maintained the support of about one out of four citizens in various polls.
Tribe: Yes, there was a die-hard faction of the population, mainly centered around religious fundamentalists, who stuck with him, since they believed, as did he himself, that he had been annointed by God to lead this country into righteous rule. But that means that 75% had lost faith in him and just wanted him to depart the scene as quickly and quietly as possible. They felt even more negatively about his Vice President, Dick Cheney, who presided over a shadow government within the Bush Administration.
In other words, the citizenry longed for a Restoration of the rule of law and calm, orderly, competent, open government, operating not from the extremes but from the middle outwards, sometimes more to the right, sometimes more to the left.
ALWAYS RE-LEARNING FROM HISTORY
One would have thought that the country had learned its history lesson from the lawless behavior of Richard Nixon three decades earlier, but it would take the Bush catastrophe to convince Americans never to permit a president to amass so much power and control.
Still, even with those Restoration laws in place, here we are 25 years after a disgraced Bush left office and we still have to remind ourselves that there always are demagogues who try to cut corners with the Constitution and the rule of law, and who try to frighten the population into wars of choice. The lesson is that the fight to preserve democracy inside America has to be waged every day, every generation, lest the forces of authoritarian self-righteousness once again rise to power.
And, since even the best-intentioned politicians find themselves abusing the power they possess -- as Lord Acton said: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- we must be alert to the necessity of cleaning out our political parties at regular intervals.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
In the 1930s something like 30% of the American public were socialists and communists.
In the 1960s we unleashed a great process of societal transformation.
Bush is the Restoration, he is destroying social security, destroying all vestiges of liberalism in the government, and has done all in his power to place government entirely in the service of the rich and privileged.
We don't need a restoration, we need a revolution.
We have shown the ability to conduct revolutions by peaceful means and thereby to achieve lasting results.
The left needs to reinvent itself as a revolutionary, non-violent movement dedicated to the radical change needed to achieve social justice in this country.
by
Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 557 comments)
on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 11:21:29 AM
I think you're too much of an optimist. You got it absolutely right about the implementing of a soviet-fascist government. If the corporatist's decide that the Chinese model for Capitalism is more advantageous for their ends they will attempt to install that model for the USA. This will happen before any restoration, for the sake of argument.
by
Swami Bogananda (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 38 comments)
on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 4:34:28 PM
