Farewell to the boilerplate presidency

As I observed in 1999 and 2000, George W. Bush’s intelligence and store of ideas were unprecedentedly limited for any major presidential candidate. He talked fluidly about just two subjects, faith-based social programs and the use of testing to raise children’s school performance, which he had talked about so many times he was at ease with them, like a salesman who has learned his pitch. Beyond that, he could not speak ex tempore about anything of substance. Being so limited intellectually and having so few ideas, he would seize on a “script” he felt comfortable with, and, like Dell and AT&T tech support in India, keep mindlessly repeating it, impervious to all contrary indications. During his presidency his favorite script became, of course, that freedom is a gift of God, that all people “deserve” to have this gift delivered to them, and that it’s America’s duty as God’s messiah to deliver it. With these boilerplate notions in hand, he was not only confident, but—amazingly and maddeningly—smug and superior in his possession of a higher wisdom not revealed to others.

In his speech last night, Bush went out as he came in. He struck no new themes, such as President Eisenhower’s warnings of a military -industrial complex, or President Reagan’s concerns about the loss of a common American memory and culture, but repeated his boilerplate phrases, among them:

The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems. Under one, a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace.

This is the belief that gave birth to our Nation. And in the long run, advancing this belief is the only practical way to protect our citizens. When people live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror. When people have hope in the future, they will not cede their lives to violence and extremism.

Consider the moronism of this. Before Bush, it had never been said that “freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God.” This is a gross distortion of the American Founding belief (which traditionalists have some problems with, of course, especially concerning how the idea of equality is to be understood, but that’s not the issue here) that “all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are … liberty … that in order to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” According to the classic American understanding, while men have an inherent right to liberty, they can only acquire such liberty through their own actions, by successfully instituting a government that can secure those rights. Thus only people who believe in liberty, who desire to secure it for themselves, and who have the capability of securing it through the institution of self-government can actually possess it. Freedom is no more a “gift” we have coming to us than is a nice house surrounded by beautiful grounds. It is something that must be earned, built, and maintained—occasionally by the use of force against a government that has become tyrannical. Bush turned the noble principle of an abstract right of liberty which each people must secure for themselves, into a sentimental “gift” which all people, just by virtue of being alive, deserve to have delivered to them. He perverted the idea of the abstract equal rights of all men into the left-liberal fantasy of a kind of global welfare state of freedom, with America the provider and administrator of freedom for all humanity, and with all humanity waiting to have it brought to their door.

But the moronism doesn’t end there. Not only does Bush enunciate a utopian vision in which all people are given their freedom by the U.S., he makes this utopian scheme the “only practical way to protect our citizens.” He might as well have said, “Establishing faith-based social programs on Pluto is the only way we can protect our citizens.”

So there’s Bush: he speaks boilerplate phrases without thought; the substantive content of the boilerplate is arrant utopianism; and he delivers this dangerous nonsense with the insufferable conviction that he possesses the one truth, the one truth that other people keep resisting for some reason. But that doesn’t bother Bush, no sirree Bob, because he’s one tough hombre, a “strong” leader. Since Bush’s brain is a tape-player rather than an instrument of thought, no setbacks to his freedom idea, no matter how obvious and stunning,—such as when his pushing the Israelis to include Hamas in Palestinian elections led to Hamas taking over the Palestinian parliament and then Gaza—ever make him question it. Nor have any intellectuals on the left or right ever seriously challenged him on it. Bush trashed America’s Founding idea, and the conservatives, its supposed guardians, did not bother defending it, did not loudly correct Bush’s mistakes, but at best uttered a few quiet, almost inaudible demurrals. There’s the betrayal of the intellectuals of our time. And only at VFR has this betrayal been pointed out.

Well, Bush has his boilerplate, and I suppose my repeated criticisms of it have become boilerplate by now as well. Perhaps this is the last time readers of this site will have to read either.

- end of initial entry -

TR writes:

Good analysis—you’d best keep saying it, because it hasn’t sunk in just yet.

I agree with your words on “gift”—the only “GIFT”, and it’s the biggest possible, is LIFE.

LA replies:

Yes, LIFE is certainly a gift. We just have it, there it is. WE didn’t do anything to make ourselves be alive. And the natural world and all the marvelous things in it are a gift. There they are, WE didn’t create them. Also, human nature. WE didn’t create our own nature.

But everything else has to be achieved and made possible by man.

David B. writes:

I may have made this observation to you before, but I will again. George W. Bush’s presidency proves again that a liberal Republican President will fail politically. His father couldn’t even win reelection, you will recall. GWB could only manage a 51 percent of the vote win over John Kerry in 2004 [LA adds: And Kerry was the worst presidential candidate ever] and was down to single digits in the polls as he leaves office. GWB is as responsible as anyone for someone like Barack Obama being elected in 2008.

A liberal Republican will be opposed by liberals because of his party label, while at the same time he antagonizes his base voters. Pandering to the left didn’t work for George W. Bush, nor did it benefit his father. GHWB jacked up the third-world immigration numbers higher than ever before and tried to court the black vote. He lost in 1992 with 38 percent of the vote in a 3-way race. A President who governed as a conservative could keep an over 50 percent majority or better. A liberal Republican never will. You will notice that in his farewells, Bush is calling for his party to go by the same boilerplate he did. “Don’t be anti-immigrant,” he says.

LA replies:

Again, he leaves office being the way he’s been all along, telling his own party that they’re “anti-immigrant.” Charming.

CN, a liberal acquaintance, writes:

A few thoughts come to mind, for which I don’t have time to do justice.

One, nicely written.

Two, I quite agree that Bush is incurious and seems to lack the gene that distinguishes an idea from a slogan, a plan from a tic.

Three, I quite agree that Bush’s unshakable conviction that God wanted him to be president, that he has a direct understanding of God’s will [LA replies: but I never said those things, so you can’t agree with me on them], that people who disagree lack head and heart… those things are at work. And they have caused deep and lasting damage to the office of the president, the country, our standing in the world, and the people who elected him.

Four, on your point that human intervention is necessary to create and perpetuate liberty. It may have missed your attention that an ACLU tag line is a quote or paraphrase from Jefferson, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

Five, I think you are simply mistaken when you say intellectuals (at least left-leaning ones) have not challenged Bush on the proposition that facts belie Bush’s worldview (which is what I think you were saying about silent left and right). [LA replies: Really? Has the left argued that Islam is incompatible with democracy and that Muslims do not desire the same freedoms we have and therefore that importing Muslims into America might be a mistake? I somehow missed that.]

Six, nothing about Bush’s policies are left-liberal. That’s about the only thing that he and left-liberals might agree on.

LA replies:

CN’s last point shows how profound is the liberal denial of Bush’s liberalism. In a lengthy conversation with CN a year or two ago, I described Bush’s fanatic devotion to open-borders and said that this showed that obviously Bush was a liberal at least in terms of immigration. CN seemed impressed by my point, which evidently had not occurred to him before. But, as we see here, the need of liberals to think of Bush as an extreme right-winger apparently made it impossible for CN to maintain that view.

AA writes:

Wonderful summary.Thank you.

LA replies:

Thanks much. I’ve had a lot of practice.

CN replies to LA:

Maybe I don’t know what “open-borders” means in the argot of VFR’s readers. But I don’t think Bush is an open-borders person. (Yes, he wants more cheap labor here, but in a regulated way. Is that “open borders”?) You and I had an exchange a month or two back when you kept saying Bush and other leading Repubs wanted increased legal immigration. As I recall, you called “CN,” on the blog, uninformed for not knowing that to be true. I asked a few times for any evidence that any Republican, including Bush, wanted increased immigration. I don’t recall seeing any.

Some people, some of whom are on the left, have argued that you can’t impose democracy at the point of a gun. (Is that different from one point made in your post this morning that opened this exchange?) Some people, including lefties, have pointed out that Bush’s description of reality differs from, well, reality. So yes, intellectuals have challenged Bush by saying that facts belie his worldview.

Suppose Bush wants open borders and suppose “liberals” want open borders. Suppose, further, that Bush and liberals want open borders for the same reasons. Just because Bush and liberals have one point of common policy does not make Bush a liberal. Now, take away all that supposin’—which I suggest brings us closer to reality. That Bush wants cheap labor “to come do jobs Americans don’t want to do,” is a sign he’s a capitalist, or a big-business Republican, or a free-marketer, or something. But a liberal? No.

Similarly, Bush is not “an extreme right-winger,” and I never said he was. On the contrary, I said—probably in conversations as old as before the 2000 elections—that Bush is not a conservative at all, and it was dumb for conservatives to latch on to him. I called him an empty suit, into which neo-conservatives expected to be able to pour their ideologies, policies and plans. Believe me, no one is sorrier than I that I was correct, and that the neo-conservatives were successful in dumping their effluent through the Bush drainage canal.

LA replies:

… I asked you a few times for any evidence that any Republican, including Bush, wanted increased immigration. I don’t recall seeing any.

Gosh, when there’s not even a minimal basis of common factual knowledge to start from, how is it possible to have any conversation? You don’t know that Bush has been striving to increase immigration vastly? You don’t know that his signature proposal was to match any foreign worker with a U.S. employer who “couldn’t find an employee” in the U.S.? Meaning that anybody in the world who would offer to work for less than an U.S. worker would take for the same job, would get ticket to the U.S. Meaning essentially open borders.

You don’t know that the original 2006 bill which Bush supported would have increased legal immigration from one million per year to three million per year?

You don’t know about the “guest worker” provision which would have inevitably become a permanent immigration bill?

Some people, some of whom are on the left, have argued that you can’t impose democracy at the point of a gun.

This is a typical lying leftist misconstruction of what Bush is up to, in which the left paints Bush as a fascist oppressor rather than as a hyper-Wilsonian liberal. Bush never imposed or attempted to impose democracy on anyone at the point of gun. Once Hussein and Taliban had been overthrown, by our guns, Bush didn’t force the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to adopt democracy. To believe he did, is to live in an anti-Bush fantasy world. We assisted them in developing new governments, against the people who were using guns on them. We protected the people of Iraq who wanted to participate in elections against the people who were using force to disrupt those elections. I never believed in this policy, but this policy was NOT imposing democracy on people at the point of a gun.

The problem with Bush is not that he sought to impose democracy at the point of gun, which he did not do, but that (1) he thought that Muslim countries were capable of adopting anything like genuine democracy and (2) he thought that Muslim democracy would make the Muslims more moderate, whereas in reality it will empower true Islam, meaning sharia and jihadism.

You write:

Suppose Bush wants open borders and suppose “liberals” want open borders. Suppose, further, that Bush and liberals want open borders for the same reasons. Just because Bush and liberals have one point of common policy does not make Bush a liberal. Now, take away all that supposin”—which I suggest brings us closer to reality. That Bush wants cheap labor “to come do jobs Americans don’t want to do,” is a sign he’s a capitalist, or a big-business Republican, or a free-marketer, or something. But a liberal? No.

All right, that might be a reasonable point, but only so long as you define liberal exclusively as left-liberal, i.e., as openness that has no consideration of self-advantage about it at all, as openness which is purely for the Other. But that’s not the only type of liberalism. Believing in the free flow of goods, services and people across borders is LIBERAL. We could call it right-liberalism, to distinguish it from the self-sacrificial suicidal ideology of left-liberalism, but it’s still liberalism.

Furthermore, wanting immigrants for cheap labor (which here I’m calling a type of right-liberalism) is only part of Bush’s ideology. He also wants immigrants because, as he said in 2000,

We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We’re a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey … and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.

For years our nation has debated this change—some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

Thus he supports Hispanics because he thinks it’s a good thing to transform America into a culturally Hispanic, Spanish speaking America. That’s left-liberalism, the liberalism that wants to embrace the Other for the sake of embracing the Other, to get rid of our historical distinctness because whiteness and European-ness is bad and guilty.

Similarly, when Bush says that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” he’s saying that there is no basis for national borders, because obviously everyone in the world has “family values,” everyone in the world is the same in the things that matter, and, Bush is clearly saying, it’s morally wrong to have borders between people who (supposedly) have the same moral values.

He thus deconstructs the very idea of nationhood. That, again, goes beyond right-liberalism and becomes the pure cultural-suicide ideology of left-liberalism.

Paul Gottfried writes, in reply to the post about Charles Johnson attributing a pro-David Duke post to me:

Relax Larry. The Lancaster papers, for which I write, have just published a long letter attacking me as shill for George W. Bush. Whom would you rather front for: a crackpot Nazi or the person you accurately described as a “moron.” By the way, your comments about Bush’s misreading of the oft quoted and most often decontextualized passage from the D of I is correct. Unfortunately that misconstruction has been in favor since Wilson’s Crusade for Democracy and it is the basic premise of American liberal internationalism. Paul

LA replies:

That’s very funny. Because you’re a “conservative,” and Bush is a “conservative,” they think you’re pro-Bush. Just as Johnson thinks I’m pro-Duke.

Re Wilson, after reading your e-mail I looked at his Fourteen Points speech; I’ve copied excerpts below. I’ve never been pro-Wilson, of course, but I see NOTHING in it remotely like Bush’s “all humans desire freedom, freedom is a gift to all, it’s our job to bring it to them.” Rather, he’s speaking of actual countries that are demanding national self-determination. Of course it’s utopian to think that all self-claimed national groups can have national self determination, but it’s not as off-the-planet as Bush’s ideas. Therefore I think you are mistaken in seeing Bush as merely a continuation of Wilson.

By the way, I think the mistake is the result of a professional deformation among right-wingers: Because they are so adversarial to the liberal mainstream, and their adversarial stand goes back so far in time, they often fail to see the more recent and WORSE developments of liberalism. They think the worst has already happened.

excerpts From President Wilson’s Fourteen Points
Delivered in Joint Session, January 8, 1918

There is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people. They are prostrate and all but hopeless, it would seem, before the grim power of Germany, which has hitherto known no relenting and no pity. Their power, apparently, is shattered. And yet their soul is not subservient. They will not yield either in principle or in action. Their conception of what is right, of what is humane and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; and they have refused to compound their ideals or desert others that they themselves may be safe.

They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs; and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond, with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view.

What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The program of the world’s peace, therefore, is our program; and that program, the only possible program, as we see it, is this:

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to admit of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.

Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other principle; and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test.

Paul Gottfried replies:

Actually I do see the difference and I stress it in a long article that came out last year in Orbis. Although Wilson in his rhetoric often sounded the same as Bush and his neocon handlers, he had a much more profoundly conservative view of culture and race. Wilson also had an IQ that was several standard deviations above that of the boilerplate president.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 16, 2009 09:05 AM | Send