Tuesday, in his thundering criticism of Bush on Iran and the NIE, Joe Biden raised the enduring question of Bush’s presidency. "If that’s true," Biden said speaking of his claim to have not seen the NIE draft until a few days ago, "then he is the most incompetent president in modern American history." And if not, by implication, the president is lying.
This enduring puzzlement is reflected throughout the political commentary community. Is he corrupt and evil? Or is he merely a bumbling, incompetent fool? Although the latter answer has been harder to sustain as his presidency has dragged on, the conclusion of corruption or evil is not satisfactory either. Maybe it is not about the individual, for if it were, things might have been expected to change more directly after Rumsfeld and Gonzalez and others were replaced. That such changes are not forthcoming indicates something deeper worth thinking about.
At the time of yesterday’s charade of a press conference, I was reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt illustrates how the totalitarian ruler becomes intransigently dedicated to the fiction he creates, for to do otherwise leads us to ruin of the organizational apparatus which supports his power and leadership position.
"The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their original lies in the face of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to what turned the trick.... Once these propaganda slogans are integrated into a "living organization," they cannot be safely eliminated without wrecking the whole structure." (p476)
Arendt’s lucidity illustrates that the asserted fiction becomes reality simply through consistently acting as if it were reality.
"The assumption of a Jewish world conspiracy was transformed by totalitarian propaganda from an objective, arguable matter into the chief element of the Nazi reality; the point was that the Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself." (p476)
The most notorious declaration of the fiction driving the Bush administration is the axis of evil speech and the War on Terror. Of course, these notions have been roundly ridiculed, and we understand they are rhetorical fabrications. What provides clarity, however, is the understanding of the crucial function of these fictions in holding together the apparatus of the right wing support Bush has put together. Arendt says:
"The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic." (p476)
This is why Bush cannot ever let go of the fiction; his entire apparatus would collapse. Although his administration has not achieved a totalitarian victory and may not even seek it, his right wing coalition operates with many of the features of totalitarian systems.
The power of the Bush fiction is not that it is nutty, but precisely the opposite: It is all too plausible. According to Arendt, the totalitarian leader bends the plausible to create his own "fictitious world."
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What distinguishes the totalitarian leaders and dictators is rather the simple-minded, single-minded purposefulness with which they choose those elements from existing ideologies that are best suited to become the fundaments of another, entirely fictitious world. The fiction of the Protocols was as adequate as the fiction of a Trotskyite conspiracy, for both contained an element of plausibility." p474-5
In this light, Bush’s comments Tuesday take on new meaning.
"Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said.
"They had the program. They halted the program. It's a warning signal because they could restart it," he said.
The logic many will apply against this fiction of Iran’s impending menace is sobering. The only "solution" to a problem of knowledge is extermination. Is that what he means? If they had a program and they halted it, and the danger is that they could restart it, there is no possible way to satisfy the implied condition that we must destroy their capability of restarting the program. Again, extermination is the only response.
Yet logic is not the point, and is not even on the table. The President’s stubborn propagation of this myth is a struggle for survival of his apparatus, his relevance, and his legacy.
His stubborn clinging, as Arendt called it, belies a totalitarian streak which, on examination, we will find throughout his presidency and the organization which brought him to power. We do not have a man who deals rationally with facts and creates policies as a result; we have a man whose organization and support depends completely on the level of his commitment to the fiction he and the organization has created: the Axis of Evil and the War on Terror. With this, we can finally understand why the labels "stupid" or totally corrupt, have never stood—neither is accurate in describing this man or his presidency. What describes Bush is a complete commitment to sustaining the fiction; a description which aptly, if only partially, described the totalitarian icons of the last century.
Clinging to his original lies through stubbornness—even in the face of absurdity—is a hallmark of his presidency that will be long remembered. Doing it even now, in the face of the national intelligence community, is evidence of the desperation circling the end of his presidency. Iran, apparently, is not the danger the fiction demands it to be. Listening to Bush would be comical if not so incredibly dangerous.