Sunday, June 10, 2007
(12:45 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Real Problem with Bush
The real problem with the Bush presidency is that it is conceptually unclear what kind of king he thinks he is -- the absolute monarch of the Ancien Régime, or the Hegelian constitutional monarch who just "says yes and dots the i's."In the initial campaign (2000), it's clear they were going for the latter: yes, George W. is a dumbass, but he's going to be surrounded by all these seasoned advisors. This image of Bush persists in the idea that Cheney, Rove, etc., are the ones really running the show -- or in the alternative narrative that what really matters is the conflict between the Department of State and the Vice-President's office. In both cases, George W. Bush personally is a non-factor -- just the "public face," chosen simply for name recognition (some voters are even rumored to have been convinced that they were really voting for George Sr. again), i.e. the "biological descent" that provides the element of randomness in Hegel's theory of the monarch.
On the other hand, you have the theory of the "unitary executive," the assertion of unheard-of "war powers," and a bunch of other indicators pointing toward an idea of an absolute monarch who can say, "L’État, c’est moi." What is missing is precisely such an "official" pronouncement -- all of the outlandish doctrines are "officially" disavowed, and situations are contrived in order to avoid a judgment from the courts (in the few situations in which the courts have issued a judgment, it has been to reject the "unitary executive"). In order for this absolute power to remain operative, it has to remain "unofficial" -- even though it is all "publicly known," no official judgment has come down upon Bush.
Maybe what is so frightening, however, is the way that these things go together -- the way that a series of "mere formalities" allow the quasi-absolute authority to continue uninhibited. And perhaps what keeps these "empty formalities" going is the fear that if the quasi-absolute authority entered the realm of "officiality," the formalities, rather than the authority, would dissolve.
This is just an over-formalized way of saying what I've been saying for years: what allows the Bush administration to continue is the fact that everyone else is afraid of triggering an "official" constitutional crisis, that is, of bringing out into the open the actual constitutional crisis under which we live. So: vote to authorize the war because you don't want to find out what happens when the president goes ahead and starts a war that Congress rejected. And so on, and so on. The Democrats are now the party of continuing to have a constitution -- paradoxically, they think that the only way to do this is by refusing to face down Bush's gravest violations of the constitution. Hence no impeachment, no real investigation into intelligence manipulation, just this endless dithering with marginal scandals like the US Attorney thing. No one wants to "officially" expose the fact that the executive branch has been effectively treating the constitution as suspended for all this time, even though the information pointing to this conclusion is publicly available and overwhelming.
