|
The ultimate “Bush is the world’s greatest genius” theory
I used to discuss from time to time the amazing phenomenon of devoted Bush worshippers explaining away every leftist and disastrous thing their man had done by theorizing that it was really part of a Machiavellian scheme of superhuman complexity aimed at achieving a conservative result by doing apparently liberal or boneheaded things. A corollary of this theory was that the more leftist or boneheaded Bush appeared to be, the more superhumanly conservative he must really be. To such irrational lengths did people go to maintain their loyalty to Bush, as well as their own self-esteem for having followed him. Carl Simpson has just pointed me to an article posted at Free Republic which takes the cake in the “Bush is a sneaky genius for the forces of light” category. According to the article, entitled, “Was Amnesty Bill a Strategery?”, Bush is not trying to open the borders. He’s trying to close the borders, by pushing on the country an open borders bill so horrible that it turns people against immigration altogether. Bush is actually a traditionalist/nationalist agent provocateur who has who has been seeking to sabotage the open borders ideology by pretending to believe in open borders. If we accept the theory, Bush would have had to be putting on the most convincing act through his entire presidency of believing and desiring the exact opposite of what he actually believes and desires. And even if this theory is meant in jest, other equally unlikely theories explaining Bush’s liberal policies as part of a conservative strategy have been offered in all seriousness. What drives people to come up with such wildly elaborate and indeed loony strategic and conspiratorial theories of politics? First, as mentioned above, conservatives need to find a way to keep liking Bush and imagining that he’s “really” a conservative after all, and that they have not been making utter fools of themselves for supporting him with such abandon all these years. Second, the crazy theorizing proceeds from the modern rejection of conceptual thought and political philosophy. Modern people believe in politics, not as the pursuit of the good and the true, but as the exercise of technique and tactics to gain advantage. As a result, they resist the idea that political actors actually believe in things and that their words and actions reflect those beliefs. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes politician’s support for liberalism is just—support for liberalism. Third, there is the modern desire to explain all political outcomes as the result of a conscious intention. If Bush has, though his fanatical pursuit of open borders, turned conservatives more against open immigration than they have ever been, thus achieving the exact opposite of what he was apparently seeking, it must be because he intended that result from the beginning. Indeed, in much of today’s political chat, Cui bono?—Whose benefit?—has been raised to the level of a metaphysical principle. If Party X can be seen as benefiting from some development, Party X must have planned it all along, no matter how unlikely that may be. If conservatives ultimately benefit from Bush’s pursuit of open-borders, then it must have been a secret conservative strategy. The assumption that certain persons can predict and are in control of entire chains of earthly cause and effect also stems from the rejection of conceptual thought and political philosophy. Traditional man seeks to order himself so as to participate in the good of being, but he knows that he is only a participant in being, not its master; moreover, the beyondness of being involves not just the higher good toward which man strives, but all the contingencies of existence over which he has no control. Modern man by contrast has lost the experience of a transcendent and contingent being in which he participates, and therefore he imagines himself, or rather society, as the master of being. For modern men, the question of politics shifts from, “How shall man and society participate in the order of being and so find their true order?”, to, “How do political actors manipulate being for their own benefit?” Thus to modern men the idea makes perfect sense that if a political actor gains from a particular and wholly unexpected outcome, he must have been controlling all events from behind a curtain so as to bring about that outcome. It is inchoately assumed that the holders of political power are the masters of being. So Bush can do anything—a belief that, as has been shown over and over, is shared by his enemies and his supporters. Bush’s enemies say, inter alia, that he spent a year manipulating the country into a war over weapons of mass destruction which he knew didn’t exist, and the non-existence of which he knew would be exposed as soon as he won the war; and the inherent unlikelihood, not to say the complete impossibility, of such a scheme is never admitted. Bush’s supporters say, inter alia, that if his passionately pursued actions on behalf of open borders result in a historic defeat of the open borders movement, that was the conscious result of his omniscient and omnipotent “strategery.” All such theories, whether they come from the left or the right, which attribute superhuman powers to political leaders, are symptoms of modern man’s alienation from the order of being, and of his substitution of man for God.
Email entry |