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The postmodern president
Deception, denial, and relativism — what the Bush administration learned from the French
BY JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL


EVERY PRESIDENT DECEIVES. But each has his own style of deceit. Ronald Reagan was a master of baseless stories — trees cause more pollution than cars — that captured his vision of how the world should be. George H.W. Bush, generally conceded to be a decent fellow, tended to lie in only two circumstances: when running for president, or to save his own skin, as in Iran-contra. Bill Clinton famously lied about embarrassing details of his private life, and his smooth, slippery rhetorical style made some people suspect he was lying even when he was telling the truth.

George W. Bush has a forthright speaking style that convinces many people he’s telling the truth even when he’s lying. But in under three years, Bush has told at least as many impressive untruths as each of his three predecessors. His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn’t trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn’t have sex with "that woman," the falsity of their claims was readily provable — by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: the confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. In his State of the Union address last January, the president claimed that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and a robust nuclear-weapons program, and that therefore we needed to invade Iraq. Even at the time, many military and intelligence experts said that the president’s assertions probably weren’t true and were based on fragmentary evidence, at best. But there was no way to know for sure unless we did what Bush wanted. When the president said on numerous occasions that his tax cuts — which were essentially long-term rate reductions for the wealthy — would spur growth without causing structural deficits, most experts, again, cried foul, pointing out that both past experience and accepted economic theory said otherwise. But in point of fact nobody could say for sure that maybe this time the cuts might not work.

This summer, when it became clear that Iraq had no active nuclear-weapons program — indeed, showed no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction — that the economy was still losing jobs, and that the administration’s own budget office predicted deficits as far as it dared project, Bush’s reputation for honesty took a turn for the worse. By the middle of July, only 47 percent of adults surveyed by Time/CNN said they felt they could trust the president, down from 56 percent in March. The president’s response to all this was to make yet more confidently expressed, undisprovable assertions. He simply insisted that his tax cuts would create jobs — and who knows? Perhaps someday they will — and that American forces would eventually turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But by then, the press was beginning to pick up on deceptions in other policy areas — the redaction of evidence of global warming in EPA reports, the administration’s refusal to provide Congress with any estimates whatsoever of the costs of occupation in Iraq. The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or — failing that — to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president’s "regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren’t lovely or convenient."

The president and his aides don’t speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it. As astute observers such as National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch have recently noted, George W. Bush campaigned as a moderate, but has governed with the most radical agenda of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the aim of most of Bush’s policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago. On the domestic front, that has meant major tax cuts forcing sharp reductions in resources for future government activism, combined with privatization of as many government functions as possible. Abroad, Bush has pursued an expansive and militarized unilateralism aimed at cutting the US free from entangling alliances and international treaty obligations so as to maximize freedom of maneuver for American power in a Hobbesian world.

Yet this is not an agenda that the bulk of the American electorate ever endorsed. Indeed, poll after poll suggests that Bush’s policy agenda is not particularly popular. What the public wants is its problems solved: terrorists thwarted, jobs created, prescription drugs made affordable, the environment protected. Almost all Bush’s deceptions have been deployed when he has tried to pass off his pre-existing agenda items as solutions to particular problems with which, for the most part, they have no real connection. That’s when the unverifiable assertion comes in handy. Many of the administration’s policy arguments have amounted to predictions — tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of US manpower — that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn’t be definitely disproved until events played out in the future. In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration’s main obstacle has been the experts themselves — the economists who didn’t trust the budget projections, the generals who didn’t buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear-weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts — a task that comes particularly easily to the revisionists who drive Bush-administration policy. They tend to see experts as guardians of the status quo, who seek to block any and all change, no matter how necessary, and whose views are influenced and corrupted by the agendas and mindsets of their agencies. Like orthodox Marxists who pick apart mainstream economics and anthropology as the creations of "bourgeois ideology" or Frenchified academic postmodernists who "deconstruct" knowledge in a similar fashion, revisionist ideologues seek to expose "the facts" as nothing more than the spin of experts blinded by their own unacknowledged biases. The Bush administration’s bêtes noires aren’t patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, but establishmentarianism, big-government liberalism, and what they see as pervasive foreign-policy namby-pambyism. For them, ignoring the experts and their "facts" is not only necessary to advance their agenda, but a virtuous effort in the service of a higher cause.

Tinker Beltway

To understand the Bush administration’s need and propensity for deception, one must go back to the ideological warfare of the 1990s, which pitted Bill Clinton’s New Democratic agenda against Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America Republicanism. Clinton’s politics were an updated version of early-20th-century progressivism, with its suspicion of ideology and heavy reliance on technocratic expertise. He argued that while government agencies or our relations with the international community might need reform, they were basically sound, and that they should be properly used to solve discrete problems. Crime on the rise? Put more cops on the street. Federal budget deficits out of control? Trim federal spending and nudge up taxes on the wealthy. Many in Washington debated whether Clinton’s policies would work; some still argue that they didn’t. But few ever questioned that their intent was to solve these specific problems.

Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans who came to power in 1995 held a very different, neo-Reaganite view. Deriding the whole notion of a federal response for every crisis, they argued that society’s problems could be solved only through a radical reordering, both of government in Washington and of America’s relationship with the world. This required tax cuts to drain money out of the Beltway; radically scaling back regulation on business; pulling America out of many international agreements; and cutting funding to the United Nations. The Gingrichites were not pragmatists, but visionaries and revolutionaries. They wanted to overthrow the existing structure of American governance, not tinker with it.

The contest between these two worldviews played out during the middle 1990s, and eventually the public rendered its verdict at the ballot box. In 1996, Clinton decisively won re-election and Gingrich’s GOP lost seats in the House. Then in 1998, at the height of impeachment, the House GOP lost even more seats, marking the first time since 1934 that the party in the White House won seats during a midterm election — and Clinton’s job-approval rating soared as high as it ever would during his eight years in office.

Voters had chosen problem-solving moderation over radical revisionism — and perceptive GOP leaders knew it. Following the 1998 electoral setback, they quieted their talk of revolution and mulled over how to soften their image. More and more of them gravitated toward the son of former president George H.W. Bush, the kindler, gentler Republican. Texas governor George W. Bush had a reputation as a pragmatist who made common cause with Democratic leaders in the Texas legislature. He launched his campaign for president not as an ideologue, but as a "compassionate conservative," who spoke the language of progressive problem-solving on issues such as education, and was perfectly willing to use the powers of the federal government to get results. Even when Bush proposed a massive tax cut during the Republican primaries, most commentators dismissed it as a campaign ploy to fend off his more conservative GOP rival, Steve Forbes. After ascending to the presidency without winning the popular vote, Bush was widely expected to compromise on the size of the tax cut.

It soon became clear, however, that Bush would govern very differently from how he ran. Instead of abandoning the tax cut, for instance, he became more determined to pass it, for rather than being a mere ploy, cutting taxes was a fundamental goal of his agenda. Politically, it was a policy on which each part of the once-fractious conservative base could agree. It also rewarded the party’s biggest donors. But most important, tax cuts would help shift the very premises of American governance. Republicans had come to view progressive federal taxation as the linchpin of Democrat strength. As Representative Jim DeMint (R–South Carolina), an up-and-coming conservative, told the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann during the 2001 tax debate, "[t]oday fewer and fewer people pay taxes, and more and more are dependent on government, so the politician who promises the most from government is likely to win. Every day, the Republican Party is losing constituents, because every day more people can vote themselves more benefits without paying for it." By this theory, the more the tax burden shifted from upper-middle-class and wealthy voters to those of the middle class, the more average voters would feel the sting of each new government program, and the less likely they would be to support the Democrats who call for such programs. To put it another way, it was a policy designed to turn more voters into Republicans, particularly the middle class. Without massive upper-bracket tax cuts, DeMint worried, "The Reagan message" — smaller government — "won’t work anymore."

But telling the majority of voters that your tax policies are designed to shift more of the burden of paying for federal government onto them is not a very effective way of eliciting their support. So, instead, Bush pitched his tax cuts as the solution to whatever problems were most in the news at the time. During the election, he argued that tax cuts were a way to refund to voters part of a budget surplus that people like Alan Greenspan worried was growing too big. By early 2001, it became clear that those surpluses were never going to materialize. So the administration cooked up an entirely new rationale: the tax cut was needed as fiscal stimulus to pull the economy out of an impending recession. In other words, the tax cut that was tailor-made for a booming economy made equally good sense in a tanking one. When the economy eventually began to grow again but only at feeble levels, the administration insisted that things would have been worse without the tax cuts (another assertion impossible to prove or disprove). And when, because of that anemic growth, coupled with gains in productivity, the unemployment rate continued to rise, the administration had yet another excuse: a new round of tax cuts, they said, would generate jobs.

The same technique — invoking the problem of the moment to sell a predetermined policy agenda — came to characterize just about everything the administration would do. Take energy policy. Oil men like the president and vice-president have wanted to drill in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for years because of their generalized belief that US energy supplies should be exploited as fully and rapidly as possible. But for a public increasingly enamored of the idea of protecting pristine wilderness areas, this rationale was insufficient to get the derricks pumping. Then, while the Bush administration was formulating energy policy during the spring and summer of 2001, California had an "energy crisis." Suddenly, there was a big problem, and the administration had what it said was the perfect solution: drilling in ANWR and giving free reign to energy producers. But California’s shortage had nothing to do with marginal supplies of oil, and we now know it had everything to do with companies like Enron gaming an ill-conceived energy-privatization regime in that state. When that became apparent, the administration didn’t skip a beat. September 11 came soon after, and instead of heading off an energy crisis, the administration pitched drilling in ANWR as a way to safeguard national security by weaning ourselves from foreign oil supplies. Many pundits have mocked these constantly shifting rationales as though the administration is somehow confused. But they seem confused only if you assume that the problem needing to be solved actually called forth the policy solution aimed at solving it. Once you realize that the desire for the policy is the parent of the rationale, and not the other way around, everything falls into place.

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Issue Date: October 24 - 30, 2003
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