Loathing Bush More

Despite living in Texas, I've criticized Gore in these pages more often than Bush. This disparity should in no way be taken to mean I loathe Bush less than Gore. I don't, I loathe him more. But I've criticized Gore more often publicly for two reasons. First, as a lefty progressive, Gore is the nearest toad in my part of the political landscape. I just encounter him ideologically before Bush. Second, the ground rules of Bush critique are harder to determine than of Gore critique since, ironically enough, Bush is a more complicated figure (though not in a good way).

From the left perspective it's difficult to decide whether mainstream politicians act badly from stupidity or from malevolence or from both. Are they more stupid than evil? More evil than stupid? Or equally stupid and evil? It's a serious question since strategies of critique and dissent may vary depending on whether the target of critique is acting from stupidity or malice (or both). Criticism of the stupid can be cruel, while criticism of the evil can't be. Jesse Helms deserves everything he gets and more, but there may be some point at which trashing addle-brained Ronald Reagan is plain mean.

In the case of George W. Bush, it's damnably hard to tell for certain. He's clearly not well-spoken nor well-thought. But does this arise from, as Christopher Hitchens has suggested, a legitimate condition like dyslexia? Or are Bush's fumblings and cruelties motivated by his desire to be the Tough White Guy and the Chief Corporate Toad? Ultimately the question isn't whether to criticize Bush -- since he clearly deserves excoriation -- but how enthusiastically and in what terms.

Of the many horrible Bush moments during the debates -- which, despite their exclusion of Nader, did a necessary service by giving American citizens the most sustained observation yet of Bush attempting to perform mentally-taxing labors -- some stand out as equally fixed between the Scylla of stupidity and the Charybdis of malevolence. The lowpoints include his repeated mangling of "the point of the military is to fight and win wars and prevent the wars in the first place" -- a malapropism that I'm still trying to sort out. His dismissal of progressive taxation as unfair (to whom exactly?) also boggles all my imaginings. But in this matter he isn't freelancing. Ronald Reagan thought of progressive taxation -- get this -- as a scheme by godless commies to destroy America. And under Gingrich the Republican Party essentially declared war on the very idea of progressive taxation as fair, which is in some ways as dastardly as trying to destroy it while you think no one's looking.

Perhaps worst of all, Bush reduced affirmative action to Unamerican and Evil Quotas, also muttering neologistically about "affirmative access," whatever the hell that means. At least Al Gore kicked his ass on this point, an ass-kicking not without bitter irony since Gore's federal downsizing program (the euphemistically termed "Reinventing Government" crusade) hurt African-Americans most of all. Bush either doesn't know or chooses to ignore the inconvenient fact that white women benefit most from affirmative action programs.

I want to focus on a Bush theme repeated endlessly in all three debates, namely, the idea that it isn't the government's business to discriminate among kinds of citizen behavior. Bush's candidacy, to say nothing of his likely victory, says more about the vestigial crudeness of American political discourse than it does about Bush himself. How can it be that anyone -- left, right, or mushy middle -- takes him in the least bit seriously as a national leader? Nowhere is this more apparent than in the critical silence following Bush's repeated panderings to this witless stereotype about the role of government. "If you're from Washington, you want to pick and choose winners," Bush said in the final debate, "I don't think that's the role of the president."

While Bush grunted thusly in the context of tax relief, and earned income tax credits, I take it as his general approach to governance. Forget about being wrong or ill-conceived: it's simply ruinous. After all, one of the reasons of law, morality, and governance is to encourage freedom, justice, and all sorts of other social goods and to discourage social ills like oppression, injustice, and undeserved harm. Forget the noxious "compassionate conservative" gibberish: Bush's underbelly is far-right corporatist with libertarian streaks. What he cannot or refuses to acknowledge is that this status-quo defending so-called neutral approach to governance (in addition to being incoherent) is necessarily unjust in an unjust society -- the obligatory response to injustice is struggle and resistance, not a pusillanimous, chimerical neutrality.

Of course one role of the government is to encourage social goods and discourage social ills. Confusion about this elementary point of political philosophy runs straight through most of Bush's efforts in Texas and most of what he says when asked why he wants to be the president and what he'd do in office. Perhaps it's a result of Bush taking Jesus as his favorite philosopher?

Just in case anyone is still unclear, I'll spell it out. Affirmative action is the business of the government because it increases equality and decreases racist inequality. Progressive taxation is the business of the government because it ameliorates unequal distribution of wealth and income, a form of injustice that is, as Jefferson, Lincoln, and Oliver Wendell Holmes recognized, especially corrosive of democracy.

So we return to the dilemma: is Bush evil or stupid or both? I'm leaning toward the latter. If he manages to beat Gore, we'll have -- alas! -- four long and painful years to make up our minds.