Friday, July 18, 2003

Busheviki and Bushevism

Is it possible to speak of a specific Bush ideology?
"Bushism" or "Bushevism" as it were?
The easiest thing in the world is to dismiss Bush as a skinny deadbeat GOP Shaman.
Smeared with sacred excrement from the Reagan Ranch and shaking his tattered red-white-and-blue fetish over the heads of the usual well fed louts, brutes and curs.
Such is the life of a political witch doctor of the first degree.
However I think there is a serious Bush ideology and he is it's chief exponent and at times a reliable fanatic in it's defense.
Bushism is designed to sound conservative in the modern sense but is in fact a classically anti-conservative ideology.

Certainly it is an elite top down ideology. Anything that relies on press relations, spin, and raw pushiness like Bushevism is not a popular ideology by any means.
Which is not to say the appearance of a bumptious populism isn't important, but this is a propaganda tactic and nothing more. Real power is concentrated in the hands of the topmost tier.

It also a statist ideology. Granted much of today's bureaucratic grown and centralization of power in Washington is a consequence of "war conservativism". However much of that growth also serves Bush's floorwalker style law and order mentality. The war on "Terrorism" has created new long-lived bureaucracies and institutions that increase state power with consequences that cannot be imagined.
One doubts Barry Goldwater would have anything good to say about a "Department of Homeland Security".

That having been said it is also a profoundly utopian ideological construct. I think of it as "reactionary socialism", a kind of vulgarized conservative notion positing that there is no limit to government resources and revenues that can be redistributed to the rich.
Classic conservatism accepts limits, limits to the reach of justice, the state's interests, among a host of other things. The main thing they are conserving is order, public and private.
Why because order is always in short supply.
Order therefore is imperiled when governance is reduced to the transfer of public assets to private interests.

And let us not forget the omnipresent Bush cult of personality with it's emphasis on trite pietism, mock heroic signifiers, pseudo-folksiness, and the President's indispensable leadership.
All of which deftly conceals the President's rhetorical limitations, ennui, incoherence, and insincerity.

The genius of Bushevism is that it overarches and unites virtually all strains of conservative thinking.
It also obscures from those groups those trends that presage the downfall of modern conservatism at the hands of the Bush family.

So I'm asking three obvious questions now:

1) Is Bushevism a revolutionary ideology?
2) If yes does it have a theory of violence outside the foreign policy context?
3) Is Bush himself a revolutionary?

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