On "Vindication"

Over the past six years, the administration of George W. Bush has been compared — favorably or not — to any number of past American presidencies. The Beloved and Respected Comrade Leader has been mentioned in the same breath, for example, as John Quincy Adams (the son of a former president who lost the popular vote); Harry Truman (whose inarticulate, tough-minded demeanor and foreign policy inexperience didn’t deter him from formulating the doctrinal template for the Cold War); Ronald Reagan (whose messianic historical vision aroused many a neoconservative nipple); John Kennedy (on whose inaugural address Bush’s speechwriters modeled their 2005 inaugural); Richard Nixon (whose executive abuses, secrecy and obstructionism ring familiar); Abraham Lincoln (who also urged the suspension of habeas protections); James Polk, Lyndon Johnson and William McKinley (who initiated pretextual, imperial wars); Woodrow Wilson (who chattered a lot about democracy); and now, implausibly enough, Gerald Ford (whose decision to pardon Nixon has been “vindicated by history”).

Leaving aside the question of how well these comparisons hold up — analogy, Darwin tells us after all, can be a “deceitful guide” — I’ll simply note here that this tendency strikes me as completely unprecedented in the history of American politics. Now, there’s nothing unusual about political figures evoking the past and tethering themselves to the legacy of their forbears. Every Democratic president after Woodrow Wilson, for example, utilized some version of his progressive wartime rhetoric. (This includes FDR during the Great Depression. It’s remarkable, for instance, how many people think Roosevelt’s “nothing to fear but fear itself” line comes from his “day of infamy” speech and not from his 1933 inaugural address.) And Republicans would be stupid not to drop Reagan’s name whenever possible — he’s really all they have to work with — or to remind the world that they’re “the party of Lincoln,” however pharisaic their praise for him actually is.

With this president, however, the comparisons are thrown together like a pig’s breakfast, underscoring what I think historians will eventually come to view as the utter soul-lessness of this administration. If Reagan was the ideal “postmodern” presidency — using cinematic techniques to promote a reactionary agenda rooted in depthless, nostalgic yearning — the Bush years have been a panicky, incoherent mess. Its most intentionally “Reaganesque” moment, in fact, has become its own sickening punch line.

I was going to write more about the nonsensical comparisons to Gerald Ford — who also was not elected to office — but I’ll just finish with this thought. Defenders of George W. Bush have nothing left now but to anticipate the “vindication” of history. They frequently cite “great” presidents whose reputations were later resuccitated, hoping perhaps to wake up one day and discover that Iraq has flourished, that the national debt has been retired, that the global Islamofascist conspiracy has bowed to the presbytery, that Katrina never happened, and that winged ponies shit golden eggs. But if they believe that some sort of worthwhile comparison exists between (a) the unpopular decision to pardon Richard Nixon from the jail time he deserved, and (b) the unpopular decision to send 20,000 more Americans off to prolong one of the most irresponsibly conceived wars in US history, I’m not sure there’s much we can do to deter that fantasy.