A Tragic Legacy
How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
By Glenn Greenwald
Crown Publishers
New York, 2007
... all of the seemingly disparate component parts and disconnected events of the Bush administration have a common origin.
They all are, to varying degrees, outgrowths of the president’s core view that the world can be understood as an overarching conflict between the forces of Good and Evil, and that America is "called upon" to defend the former from the latter. That view finds a corresponding expression for the president on the personal level, where the moral and religious duty of the individual is to divine God’s will (the Good) and to act in accordance with it.
By definition, this premise demands the identification of Evil, which is the enemy—an enemy that is pure in its Evil and that, by its nature, cannot be engaged, offered compromises, negotiated with, understood, managed, contained, or ignored. It can only be attacked, hated, and destroyed.
When expressed and implemented as a governing philosophy, this belief in the centrality of Good vs. Evil results not in an effort to limit government power, but rather to expand it drastically, both domestically and abroad, in order to accumulate power in service of the battle against (perceived) Evil and to impose (perceptions of) Good. Such a philosophy is centrally predicated on the certainty that government leaders can divine God’s will—not with regard to specific issues and policies but in a generalized moral sense—and can therefore confidently enlist and expand the awesome power of the American government in service to universal moral dictates. As a political philosophy, it is therefore far from "conservative." Rather, it is messianic, evangelical, and Manichean.
With ruthless clarity and bone-chilling analysis, Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy takes readers on a tour of the simplistic black-and-white world that Bush has created over the past six years—a world where all situations are reduced to a nightmare cartoon of pure Good and pure Evil, where military solutions are the only solutions, where any call for calm consideration is equated with backing the forces of darkness.
Familiar to Daily Kos readers as a first-class blogger and constitutional lawyer, Greenwald’s first book, How Would a Patriot Act?, a slim volume released last year, was a bestseller that detailed his own previously apolitical view of America and his gradual shift to alarm over the extremist and illegal actions repeatedly taken by the executive branch.
In A Tragic Legacy, he wrestles with much more significant and amorphous material as he attempts to trace the dangerous, stark philosophy underlying the most pernicious policies of the current administration and to tease out their implications for the character of this nation. To say that he succeeds is a massive understatement. From every aspect—writing, clarity of thought and most importantly, structure of the book (often neglected in similar works)—he pounds his argument home about the utter bankruptcy of thought behind the president’s words and actions: This is extremism. This is immoral. This is, ultimately, un-American at its core.
Greenwald has chosen a difficult topic, one fraught with temptations to resort to hyperbole and over-psychoanalyzing the president responsible for leading America into an abyss of immorality. Wisely, he begins the book laying his case carefully, brick by factual brick, with the first chapter outlining the decline of the president’s wild popularity in polls in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to his extreme unpopularity today. Examining Bush’s statements, actions, advisors and cheerleaders, the author tracks the worldview presented in all its gradually emerging and underscored glory:
The president is driven by his core conviction that he has found the Good, that he is a crusader for it, that anything is justified in pursuit of it; and that anything which impedes his decision-making is, by definition, a deliberate or unwitting ally of Evil.
His own allies in "Good"—conservative pundits and the fevered neocons attached to such think tanks as AEI—come under close examination, and their panicked attempts to disassociate themselves and the political philosophy known as "conservatism" from Bush are detailed. Greenwald calls them out sharply on their "scrambling":
The conservatives’ frantic scampering to distance themselves and to disassociate their political movement from Bush stands as a powerful testament to the president’s steep fall and isolation.
In that regard, there is a serious, and quite revealing, fraud emerging in the political landscape—namely, that the so-called conservative movement is not responsible for the destruction wrought on the country by the Bush presidency and the loyal Republican Congress that followed him. Even more audacious, the claim is emerging that the conservative movement is actually the prime victim here, because its lofty "principles" have been betrayed and repudiated by the Republican president and Congress that have ruled our country for the last six years.
Greenwald casts the same dispassionate eagle eye on the national media in general, calling journalists out on their failure to report the known discrepancies between Bush’s black-and-white presentation of facts prior to the Iraq invasion as the nation tumbled inevitably down the slope to war on Bush’s cartoonish and childish terms. He acknowledges that part of this desire to hold back and cheer on may well have to do with the shock the entire nation felt after 9/11—after all, he points out, journalists are people too and many of them were based in New York and Washington and had genuine fears about the personal safety of themselves and their loved ones. But as the hysteria died down, Greenwald implies that a fear more associated with their profession than with their personal safety took hold. As the administration lashed out at critics like the clear-eyed Howard Dean and U.N. inspector Scott Ritter, the media feared that the focus could well shift to their own perceived not-clapping-loud-enough tendencies, and they left a lot of the anti-invasion voices twisting in the wind.
The image described by [New York Times reporter Elizabeth] Bumiller—national journalists paralyzed by fear, literally afraid to "get into an argument with the president"—seems like one that has prevailed in many countries during many time periods in history—but (with some exceptions) not in America. Yet that is the climate that the president succeeded in imposing on the nation, all by depicting the world in dualistic terms.
This dualistic worldview, Greenwald maintains, is due to a conjunction of forces that have rallied to the president’s Manichean call for different reasons—fundamentalists whose own Good versus Evil religiosity demand a "bring it on!" stance to the End Times, neocon warmongers who dream of empire, oil supply advocates who believe it imperative to control the Middle East’s energy resources and pro-Israeli factions that believe it necessary to conflate each and every interest of Israel with that of America. None of these categories is mutually exclusive, of course, but their merging perpetuated the "League of Justice"-type myth and helped sustain it—until recently—for the American public.
The dumbed-down equivalency of "Good" Bush versus "Evil" opponents (Saddam, liberals, world opinion, the UN) has proven devastating to both domestic discourse and international diplomacy. But in Greenwald’s view, the most dangerous facet of this historical review of Bush’s statements, actions and character lies not in documenting the past, but in sounding a carefully calibrated five-alarm fire signal about the future: the seemingly inevitable war with Iran.
And it is here that the brilliance of the structure of A Tragic Legacy is revealed, in the fourth chapter of the book, ominously entitled "Iran: The Next War?" Greenwald has meticulously laid the groundwork for showing that the rhetoric directed toward Iran, both of the president and his varied self-interested supporters, has an appalling déjà vu element that America overlooks at its peril. Even the first portion of this chapter—like the first half of the book—is written with a reasonably studious air, with many cited examples and somewhat distant (albeit critical) analysis. Thus, when the author ramps up the argument and alarum over the administration’s moves toward Iran, it is against a background of proven rationality. What would have struck an independent-minded reader as partisan hyperbole early in the book comes across as nothing less than an obvious conclusion to draw from the president’s actions and swaggering, take-no-prisoners trash talk toward Iran. Take the following passages, for example:
... the president’s own claims about Iran make diplomacy all but impossible from the start. When one embraces the view that a certain country is the equivalent of Nazi Germany and its leader tantamount to Adolf Hitler, diplomacy, by definition, is not occurring and is certain to fail, since one has preordained that the country, by definition, cannot be trusted and cannot be reasoned with.
**
For the most deluded war cheerleaders, it is always 1938. Hitler is any leader of another country whom we do not like. The New Nazi Germany is any country opposed to U.S. interests or that does not submit fully to American dictates. Appease means "a desire to avoid starting new wars." Churchill means "an eagerness to wage wars without limitation or restraint on any country one does not like."
If readers aren’t convinced—either of the seriousness of the Bush administration’s intent to provoke war with Iran nor of the attendant consequences—Greenwald follows the Iran chapter with a nauseating review of how far the president has taken us down the path to reckless and shameful immorality in the torture, detention and civil liberties realms, swelling to a symphonic crescendo when he declares:
The most ironic—and the most revealing—aspect of the erosion of America’s moral credibility is that the reprehensible policies that caused it were "justified" as necessary steps in a moralistic mission. The president’s moral certitude is what enabled, is what spawned, some of the most amoral acts in our country’s history.
Aside from the major themes touched on in this review, there are crucial observations made throughout that shed light on this president’s—and this nation’s—slide into amoral, rah-rah simplicity. Greenwald, for example, makes astute observations about the appeal of evangelistic religion itself to Bush, when he observes that the morphing of an admitted alcoholic into a rabidly religious devotee is a psychological "lateral" move, not necessarily a step up in the evolution of an individual. He also notes that the question of whether Bush is reflecting truly "Christian" values (a favorite debate among liberals) is, while interesting, ultimately irrelevant as long Bush believes he is acting on behalf of God.
Perhaps the most depressing realization Greenwald reaches is that efforts to dispute and defy Bush by whatever means—legislative, rhetorical or judicial—in the end may prove to be totally counterproductive. In the Manichean mindset of the president, opposition only underscores his cartoon version of the world; Of course, those on a mission from God will be persecuted and attacked by the minions of "Evil." Sigh. Of course.
In the end, Greenwald seems to hold out hope for the 2008 elections to make a difference since Bush has proven himself as welcoming of criticism since it reinforces this persecuted "Good Guy" narrative. If we can stave off war with Iran—which seems to be most important goal in the writing and timing of publication of this book—perhaps we can remind Americans of the following fierce statement the author makes when reminding us of our country’s core principles:
From its founding, America has rejected the worldview of prioritizing physical safety above all else, as such a mentality leads to an impoverished and empty civic life. The premise of America is and always has been that imposing limitations on government power is necessary to secure liberty and avoid tyranny even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result. That is the foundational American value.
It is this courageous demand for core liberties even if such liberties provide less than maximum protection from physical risks that has made America bold, brave, and free. Societies driven exclusively or primarily by a fear of avoiding Evil, minimizing risks, and seeking above all else that our government "protects" us are not free. That is a path that inevitably leads to authoritarianism—an increasingly strong and empowered leader in whom citizens vest ever-increasing faith and power in exchange for promises of safety. That is most assuredly not the historical ethos of the United States.
And, Greenwald notes, "What is really at stake as we decide whether to repudiate or embrace the Bush legacy is the national character of our nation."