Monday, April 05, 2004
(11:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
In Memoriam: George W. Bush
Now that it's almost over, can we all just admit that the Bush presidency never should have happened? Is anyone else a little bit annoyed in retrospect that no one organized a massive worldwide protest over Bush v. Gore? When I think of all the time and energy that I've spent the last few years thinking about and debating about policies and actions that have been so consistently and obviously wrong, I'm disgusted. I can't help but think that much of the left has probably lost much of its intellectual edge, simply because all debate was carried on at a third-grade level -- and now everyone is positively begging for mediocrity. In fact, I'd settle for someone who's not even quite up to the mediocre level.
Once Bush is gone, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief now that everything is "back to normal," not realizing that "normal" has been fundamentally shaped by people like Bush's advisors. With Bush gone, taxation will still be considered vaguely immoral, and progressive taxation "unfair." A substantial social wage will still be out of the question. Our public schools and universities will continue to deteriorate. Our addiction to cars will continue. The perfectly sensible policies of people like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader -- and I really mean that; if you sit down and read what they're proposing, it's not a radical communist revolution by any means -- will continue to sound like pipe dreams.
If the only thing the left can unite behind is a desire to get rid of a miserable failure of a president who was only ambiguously legitimate to begin with, then I don't really have a lot of hope for the future. I don't think we're going to experience a military coup or a radical fundamentalist government or anything -- in fact, I think that I personally will do just fine in any case -- but I don't see much hope for meaningful change.
