A Return to Sanity

Gabriel Paquette gets it right in The Guardian: 

It is hard to imagine an inaugural address more steeped in the classical conservative tradition than the one delivered by Obama last week. ... The first few days in office have confirmed that the Obama administration is a restoration, not a revolution. There is much to cheer one up after eight years during which the inmates ran the asylum. Executive orders closing secret overseas prisons, banning torture and shutting down Guantánamo are all laudable acts. Removing restrictions on federal documents to increase transparency and instituting a salary freeze on senior staff are likewise welcome, long-overdue gestures.

That's how I've come to see things. We're back to an era in which the President seems to take his job seriously, in which sophisticated experts are appointed to top posts, there's an actual process of policy formation, the President and his top officials think about how their words will be interpreted in many different contexts before they speak , etc. As I was growing up, this  was pretty much the normal state of affairs under both Democratic and Republican presidents. It was just plain how you ran a country.

The last eight years were this terrifying fugue state in which the normal rules were suspended -- Congress might rush into emergency session to intervene in the case of one brain-damaged woman; the President appointed hacks and cronies to important government positions, the Administration based policies on arguments that would obviously have to be rejected by anyone who didn't already share its narrow assumptions about the way the world works, etc.

It's nice to be back from the fugue state. Hope we didn't break too much.

Comments

[onchyophaga]

@Doc Joseph,
as late "euroweenie" Albert Einstein put it:
It's more difficult to destroy a preconceived opinion than an atom.

[Scott Joseph, MD]

Thanks to Obama, we will have a WMD attack by Muslim terrorists on US soil sometime around late 2009 to 2010. What will follow will make the restrained policies of the Bush administration seem mild.

W was a great President. Euroweenies are worthless allies. Obama is a clueless, corrupt, Chicago machine politician, poorly educated and disorganized in thought. he did attend elite schools and is a liberal. Therefore, European castrati (the ruling class) love him.

[Don]

Looking back upon Thomas Jefferson, I realized that while Jefferson would not have been pleased with any of the recent Presidents or presidential candidates (Clinton, Bush, Gore, or Kerry), nonetheless the Democrats in that list were very like Jefferson in one respect; they are world-class hypocrites, as Jefferson was. Jefferson was very principled in the abstract, but committed some of the most outrageous acts as President, acts for which he condemned others for with righteous indignation.

The Democrats of our era have behaved similarly with the Bush presidency.

Jackson wasn't a hypocrite, but it's difficult to find a President comparable to him; put in Bush's shoes he may well have challenged some of his opponents to a duel or perhaps put them on trial for treason. 'Waterboarding' would have been the least of it.

[Anonymous]

Cherry-picking. Well, maybe.

By the way, I hope that I won't someday contrast Lincoln with Obama to the latter's detriment.

I wonder to what extent we can compare the America of Jefferson and Jackson with America now. A whole lot of difference between a rural and an industrialized nation.

Yes, the Democrats of yesteryear would not be all that pleased with the Democrats of today. Certainly not Jefferson.

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal, even for our presently beleaguered Republic, and no matter which party governs it.

[Don]

Ah Ralph, you're cherry-picking again.

If you wish to contrast Lincoln with Bush to the latter's detriment then be fair enough to consider what the some of the Democrat's forebears might make of the present Democrats. The Democrats celebrate a 'Jefferson-Jackson' day each year in honor of the architects of the modern Democratic party.

In today's politics I think Jefferson would be a tx-cutter, albeit he would be cutting taxes on farmers and laborers more than on industrialists. Jefferson was in favor of small government - a little like none other than Ronald Reagan in that respect.

Moving on to Andrew Jackson, I think that Jackson would consider Bush a wimp, to be honest. Jackson was invariably in favor of strong measures to be taken with the country's enemies. Bush would be far too much of a milquetoast for him, though he might have gotten along with Cheney. But Jackson's opinion of modern Democrats would have been simply unprintable.

[Anonymous]

As the cliché goes, Don, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. True enough, former presidents did break eggs if they thought it necessary to achieve their goals. As has G. W. Bush. But it is not perfectionist to insist that his name does not deserve to be uttered in the same breath as the names of FDR, Wilson, Washington, and Jefferson.

The question is whether a political leader recognizes the true threats to a country and mobilizes the proper resources to counter them effectively. This Bush largely failed to do.

I will mention Lincoln; this sums it up nicely.

[Don]

Jefferson would have been appalled, but might well have behaved similarly (or worse) himself.

The Jefferson record has been cleaned up historically in a major way, but if you look into the actual facts of how he often comported himself when President, a different story emerges.

I noticed you didn't mention Lincoln; good thing that, because Lincoln also wasn't much on habeus corpus when it came to surpressing Confederates! He defied a writ of habeus corpus issued by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who was also circuit judge for Maryland, where the arrests occurred.

Or FDR. Let's not forget that the internment of the California Nisei occurred on his watch, secret trials and executions of German spies, and other epiodes. FDR was a pretty grim dude as a wartime president, at least when it came to the country's enemies.

I'm not sure what Washington would have made of it. The Revolution was played under different rules than today, sometimes gentlemenly warfare, some not so gentlemenly. Washington could be as ruthless as the next man, and I doubt he would have been as restrained as Bush with handling illegal combatants. He wasn't kind to the Indian tribes fighting him, which were the closest contemporaries, and also not particularly restrained in putting down Shay's Rebellion later as President.

And let's not talk about that light of the Intellegentia as a wartime President, Woodrow Wilson. He also was a hard man when it came to dealing with dissent.

The fact is that what you call 'fugue' is a much more common in the US than you think. Particularly in wartime, and most certinly when the US regards itself as responding to an attack. Civilian loss of life on 9/11 was far heavier than at Pearl Harbor, or the even from the sinking of the Lusitania.

Even so Bush's reaction was more restrained than previous president's had been, if not perfect in the judgement of perfectionists.

[Anonymous]

There does exist that dysfunctional thinking amusingly called BDS or Bush Derangement Syndrome. G. W. Bush was not a second Hitler or Mussolini; if anything, his opponent Saddam Hussein, with his admiration and emulation of Stalin, deserves this dubious distinction.
Moreover, by demonizing the former President, BDS sufferers run the risk of discrediting their own criticism by making themselves vulnerable to charges of distortion and exaggeration.
However, that Andrew uses the psychiatric term "fugue" here isn't an example of BDS. It fits.
A psychogenic fugue typically involves a sudden departure from a customary residence with the assumption of a new identity elsewhere. During the fugue, there is no recollection of earlier life, and after recovery amnesia for events during the fugue.
G. W. Bush and his fellow necons Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith et al. weren't conservatives. They were reactionary radicals whose intention was to give the American republic a new identity that would have appalled Washington and Jefferson. Their disdain for the Constitution and habeas corpus shows this amply.
Recent disclosures that e-mails and other documents were destroyed at the White House and elsewhere correspond to a fuguer's amnesia, so here, too, Andrew's analogy applies.
Though Obama's inaugural speech was no Gettysburg Address, it impressed me not least by its reasoning pragmatism and invocation of traditional American ideals of hard work and sacrifice. If that isn't conservative, what is?

[gforaker]

"One of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the
dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
- Tom Wolfe

[gforaker]

"One of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the
dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
- Tom Wolfe

[gforaker]

"One of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the
dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
- Tom Wolfe

[Don]

Koch, please cut out the 'fugue state' nonsense. Perhaps that is how the US was percieved in Germany; but Germany clearly doesn't understand the US very well!

Really devoted Democrats like Alex Baldwin may have felt alienated because they weren't in power over any part of the national government, but that isn't any different than Republicans felt after Watergate or during 1992-94. Or at the moment, come to think! The cure for that is either party renewal or major boo-boos by the ruling party, probably both.

The phrase might accurately describe Germany under You Know Who, Italy under Mussolini, or Russia under Putin. Not the US, and particularly not the US with divided power.

The only way it could be otherwise is if your group believes it somehow has a god-given or providence-endower RIGHT to govern without interference from those whose beliefs differ from yours; surely NOT an opinion healthy in a functioning democracy

[Koch]

Don, I think the consistent stress of Obama's policies has been to focus on those who are disadvantaged, which will affect poor whites in the 'real' parts of West Virginia as well as poor blacks or poor Mexicans or poor Alaskans. Very very few of his policies divide down along ethnic lines - almost everything is appended to class difference and availability of opportunity. The fact that proportionately more blacks, Native Americans, single mothers, etc. inhabit the lower classes is a sideline. White working America will rise or fall with black and purple working America under Obama. White people would never have come out for him in such numbers if the majority of them thought differently.

Looking back over the last 20 years, I'd say a pivotal point in the perception of the US as a fugue state (which I agree with) took place in 2004 when Bush achieved reelection. Simply very few people outside of the US could believe that he was reelected with an even greater number of voters. And the caroming on Schiavo - as Andrew points out, this was something that utterly baffled the rest of the world - followed by the mess that was Katrina and the seeming inattention to Iraq until 2006/7 - these things were barely comprehensible to outsiders. Remember Bush's sudden focus on Mars? The complete disregard for Israel/Palestine? Same deal. You guys just lost it there for a while.

[Don]

"The last eight years were this terrifying fugue state"

It's difficult to understand how an otherwise intelligent commentator can write such tripe and actually seem to take himself seriously.

The US wasn't in a 'fugue state' caused by anything other than having several major terroris incidents occur on one day, then having many 'friends' turn upon the country within a week or two (after a brief saccharine show of sympathy).

Having a few office buildings dropped by hijacked commercial airliners is a huge shock and did change public opinion by a lot for a time, but it didn't change the US into the Third Reich or Stalin's Gulag or anything like it. It was (and is) an episode in the national life.

Sweet Al Gore's loss in the 2000 election WAS a kind of tragedy, but not for the reasons most liberal commentators think. After electing a president who understood the people of the US very well and loved them (and the country) despite that knowledge - the Democratic Party nominated a man who didn't have that kind of knowledge.

I think Gore loved the US in a kind of lofty way, but I don't think he has near the deep understanding Clinton has, so it's hard to say whether Gore loves the US as it is, or as an entity which will follow Gore on his crusades. Kerry was worse than Gore in that respect. Another example was Reagan and the first Bush; Reagan grew up in small-town Illinois and did many things before going into politics; Bush had a silver-spoon upbringing and lacked the common touch as badly as Gore and Kerry did.

Silver-spoon upbringings do not great politicians make. Obama is a lot less of a silver-spoon type. He seems far better grounded in the common than Gore was. The part of Obama's resume which impresses me the most was his choice to work in the streets of Chicago rather than a judge's chambers or a New York high-rise for a presitigious consultancy or law firm, a choice Gore or Kerry seemed incapable of. So I have my hopes for him; hell, I voted for him, I NEVER would have voted for Gore or Kerry!

I do wonder whether Obama is sufficiently connected with working white America to succeed. You need gut understanding as well as intellectual understandng to succeed in his office; it remains to be seen whether he has what it takes.