The Bush Years might not have produced much to be proud of, but one thing the have produced is an abundance of theories about the origin of the Bush Years. Many of them are quite good; they provide both historical/theoretic insight and also guides for practical action. I decided to make a chart of some of them, which you’ll find below.
What I find most surprising and also invigorating about these ideas is that they are not “Marxist”; they are not merely rehashings of old-school dialectical materialism. These new accounts are genuinely original takes on the way the world works, what’s wrong with it, and what best to do about it. Some of them, most especially, I think, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, are state-of-the-art — they bring an exhilerating clarity to events that are seen only dimly or darkly through the older lenses lying around on the critical workbench.
One thing we ought to be doing is deciding what to use in this near-embarrassment of riches and what to discard; what to expand upon and what to emphasize. Which ways of thinking about the Bush years provide us with the best tools for digging deeper, and which (to use an all-too-apt metaphor) are dry wells?
If we are going to blog the future, these Big Pictures can be Big Maps of the terrain as we find it.
Names were picked for convenience.
The Noble Lie refers to Adam Curtis’s account of the rise of the neo-cons as presented in his BBC documentary series The Power of Nightmares. (Hat tip to Maynard G Krebs for his Daily Kos post pointing us to it.) According to Curtis, the primary motivating force in the rise of the neo-cons is a fear of US decay do to an over-abundance of freedom and license brought by the very success of progressive policies under the New Deal and the Great Society. The neo-cons felt that national unity and purpose required a national enemy, invented if necessary, to keep the people in line.
Curtis’s take on recent history relies on taking Leo Strauss’s Platonic ideas very seriously.
Key Quote for The Noble Lie
“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
The Shock Doctrine refers to Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. Hopefully this is familiar to most readers by now. Klein’s thesis is that Milton Friedman’s idea (that economic free-market reform, not welcome by the supposedly ignorant masses, must be forced through in the aftermath of war or natural disaster, or other kinds of “shock”) is a guiding principle for policy makers, both in the US and abroad.
Key Quote for The Shock Doctrine
“[O]nly an actual crisis, real or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are laying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Milton Friedman, quoted in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 6
The Great Game II refers to the idea that the various foriegn policy manuvers under Bush Jr. have been undertaken to prevent China from owning the 21st Century. This is a common enough idea that no single author is responsible for it. It recalls, in certain ways, the purported struggle between Britain and Russia in the 19th century, The Great Game. According to this idea, the “Global War on Terror” is a cover for the Great Game II.
One Example of Many Quotes for The Great Game II
“America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we are troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family.”
— Mitt Romney, from the Faith in America speech.
Year 501 refers to the oldest of these ideas, as presented in Noam Chomsky’s 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues. On this reading there is nothing special about the Bush years, other than their unusual intensity. On Chomsky’s view, the popular Big Picture of the last century as a Cold War struggle between East and West was a myth. The struggle was then, was before, and is now a struggle between North and South, as the countries of the Northern Hemisphere make war on and dominate the Southern. 1993 was the 501st year since Columbus crossed the Atlantic, hence the title.
The Prize refers to the most common, I suppose of the Big Pictures we work with now. Daniel Yergin’s 1991 book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. Many of us read current events exclusively through the lens of Bushco desire for oil, and resource dominance generally.
_______________________
Crucially, notice the difference between The Great Game II and The Prize. Both credit Dick Cheney with great importance. The first is nationalistic and involves the neo-cons; the second is not particularly nationalistic and involves “BushCo”, which can be read as Bush Sr. and his cronies such as Jim Baker. The Prize is about the survival of the aristocracy and the preserving of wealth, more than about the domincance of the US as such. Which theory you give more credence to depends to some extent upon what, exactly, you think Dick Cheney is up to. Similarly, giving more weight to either The Noble Lie or The Great Game depends on what you think the neo-cons are up to.
_______________________
This chart is not meant to be complete or exhaustive — it’s meant to spur thought and discussion, and also simply to call attention to some the remarkably fertile ideas that have been developed in recent years. Hopefully this chart can be expanded and reflected upon: made into a chart of the resources we have for figuring out where we are, what to do about it, and where we go from here.
24 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
Author
at at DailyKos in violation of rules, because it’s Christmas Sunday and no one is reading this stuff anyway.
🙂
of the neocons, in the writing of Strauss, and of Bill Kristol and the others, through AEI and other sites.
We need a clearer idea also of the political philosophies of people like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and other Democratic Party members. Though they’ve shown themselves complicit over the past year, knowing that is not enough. It’s only the “what” of their actions since the midterms.
We need to know and understand the “why”, their “reasoning” – if it can be called that – behind those actions, to complete the “big picture”.
The Century of Self could be added to the Big Picture Show for shedding light on our own behaviors during the Bush years as well as our government’s.
The series traces the history of self interest, consumerism, corporatism and politics from Wilson to Clinton and Blair and includes associated psychologists and PR shakers and movers. Though it doesn’t cover the Bush years specifically, Curtis’s series ties together many of the threads we see culminating in the events and trends of the last few years and many of the themes, if not all, listed above.