Glenn Greenwald’s new book is getting wonderful reviews from the Netroots.
A Tragic Legacy is a good explication on what the Bush Administration has left us, the rabbit holes we’ve all gone down.
But I have a big problem with it.
By isolating his examination to the George W. Bush administration, Greenwald lets the rest of us off the hook.
The fact is that the Bush worldview came from somewhere. As I’ve said here until I’m blue in the face, it is a product of the Nixon Thesis. Dick Cheney wo
rked for Nixon, in Nixon’s darkest hour. He became chief of staff to Gerald Ford, who promptly pardoned Nixon. The assumptions of that era are Cheney’s assumptions but, more important, the assumptions of Nixon are our assumptions.
The assumptions of the Nixon Thesis are built into the DNA of every pundit in Washington. They are built into the worldview of every Washington-based advisor to every Presidential candidate. They are the assumptions of every lobbyist. They have attained, literally, biblical significance, because they have been validated, again-and-again, both by events and by the American people.
By people like you.
The Nixon Thesis of Conflict holds that power is an either-or
proposition, that there can be, in the end, just one power center, and
that the projection of force is in fact the projection of power.
Nixon’s "achievement" was to take the Cold War begun by Democrats in
1947 and turn it into a partisan bludgeon on behalf of Republicans.
Ronald Reagan validated that use of the Cold War and, so his fans
think, won it through military force. George H.W. Bush then used that Thesis to win the First Gulf War, through military force. That’s powerful validation.
The idea that there may be more to power than killing people, that
economic strength, moral strength, and political freedom may be more
than words, was rejected by the Nixon Thesis. This view has since been
validated, again-and-again, by the voters. So that it is assumed to be
true by the media, assumed to be true by the political class,
assumed to be true by millions of Americans, just as 40 years ago we
believed in the New Deal assumptions of FDR, and just as a generation
before that we believed in the Progressive assumptions of Theodore
Roosevelt.
The blame, the fault, the sins of this era did not spring from
Bush’s mind like Athena from Zeus. They come from somewhere. They come
from history. They have been validated over an entire generation, and
it is their failure to remain relevant in the face of new challenges
which is the story of our time, not Bush’s continued reliance on the
ideology.
The story of our time has been the creation of a new thesis, a new
worldview, a new set of assumptions to replace the Nixon Thesis which
failed under Bush, and the acceptance of that by the American people.
This acceptance has not yet been fully validated through a Presidential
election, which is why the pundits refuse to see if, but the change is
real. It’s in our hearts.
What are these assumptions?
- Consensus, working outward from agreement, is better than conflict.
- Power does not emerge solely from the barrel of a gun.
- Agreements require compromise.
Consensus, openness and transparency are the themes we are building on.
These themes come out of the medium you are now using, the Internet.
They are not products of TV, and they are not subject to TV
manipulation.
Barack Obama seems to intuit all this, which is why he is doing so
well. But he has not laid out that vision, which is why he is also
doing so poorly. By contrast, John Edwards attacks the Nixon Thesis
directly and Hillary Clinton, like her husband before her, leans
against the Thesis, seeking only to moderate it.
The next six months will test whether Obama can make this theme
explicit, whether he is willing to sell it. TV will call this the
question of whether he has vision. But it’s really a question of
whether he has Values, based on the Myths of his time, which can aim at
the Power we must bring to bear against our real problems. These
problems are not Iraq, or terrorism, or the stupid economy. These
problems are the survival of the planet and the War Against Oil, both
of which are masked by the headlines of each day, and ignored by TV
because they are long term, non-sexy, seemingly intractable problems
which don’t respond to sound bites, back-and-forth arguments or news
crew stand-ups.
As of today, I’m still for Edwards, but if Obama can "get it" he could
well be Roosevelt, and if he doesn’t then Hillary Clinton will
certainly be Nixon, feeding conservatives policy victories while
offering the Netroots red meat rhetoric, and beginning a slow turn in
the ship of state which may or may not come in time.
