The Cult of Bushism

I saw another one the other day.

It was a pick-up truck, a black "W the President" sticker in the window. No other adornment. No McCain stuff. Nothing about issues, nothing about the party.

The sticker looked clean, and new. Just like the "W ’04" ovals I see on other big cars and trucks as I drive around Atlanta and its suburbs.

Very strange. Given the reality of our time, an economy in the tank, the American brand on the ropes, the air increasingly hazardous to your health, the cost of filling that car passing $100.

The question no one in the media or on the left is asking — what’s going on?

George W. Bush has become an -ism. And Bushism has become a cult, something we’re going to have to contend with seriously in the years ahead.

What is Bushism?

Obviously the philosophy behind the politics of George W. Bush. But what is that, exactly? You can name the policy stands, but I’m more interested in the myths and values, the assumptions, which lie behind those stands.

There has always been a strain of thought in America which defines
freedom and liberty selfishly. Freedom for me but not for me. A natural
aristocracy, accused of wealth and guilty of education,
self-perpetuating. Everyone else lumpen — let them eat rhetoric. The elite will protect and the rest must obey.

In Bushism, the ideals of America are not a promise but a threat. It’s easy to see in movies like Gangs of New York,
in the character of Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. You
can see it again in another Day-Lewis creation, Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. (Funny how an Englishman would be best at portraying this American archetype.)

I can’t be free unless you are not. I cannot feel wealthy unless you
are poor. Life is a zero-sum game. My success depends upon your
failure. I am better than you are. The purpose of government is to
endorse this choice God made.

This strain of thought has always been with us, wherever power peers out and sees a precipice. It lies in all our hearts, the worst of us and the best of us.

It is what John Adams feared when he endorsed the Alien & Sedition Acts. It was in the heart of every Confederate patriot, ready to die for "state’s rights" and the natural inequality of man. It was in the Robber Barons, it was what Populism was designed to fight.

It has been alive in the 20th century. It beat in the heart of Jim Crow. It lay in the fears of Joe McCarthy. But notice, please, what it did during this time. It somehow managed to transfer itself, like a bacillus, from the wealthy and powerful to the middle class and powerless. This is what made Nixonism into Bushism.

With the break-up of the Nixon coalition in our time, we can see its elements. Fear of the foreigner, Lou Dobbs. Fear of the accepting, James Dobson. Fear for the loss of resources and power, Dick Cheney.  Fear that all I have taken for myself may be brought low, Sheldon Adelson. Rupert Murdoch.

Rush Limbaugh. Bill O’Reilly. Sean Hannity.These men are the best expressions of Bushism. They were not born wealthy. They were given some wealth, for the job of protecting wealth. And protect it they do, with fear, aimed at the middle-class. Raw, nameless, unreasoning fear. They are the transfer agents, they infect the rest of us.

A single election won’t kill this fear. An election means that fear has become a minority view again. But the fear which spawned Bushism will remain, because it lies in every human heart. Even when we are governed by the better angels of our nature, those other angels sit on our shoulder, waiting, watching, whispering into our ears.

America’s greatest leaders have been those who heard those angry, fearful voices, yet took upon themselves the job of facing those fears down, first in themselves, then in their fellow citizens. This is what great leaders do.

Norah Jones Lyrics
American Anthem Lyrics

What America has lacked, outside the periods of its greatest crises, are not great leaders but great followers. Idealists who think about things other than themselves, and whose idealism is not just welcomed, but nurtured, by their parents’ generation. You can see this in many movies of the late 1930s, as The Greatest Generation was brought up on stories of the past and obligation for the future. You can see it in the sermons of abolitionists in the 1850s, the stirring words that led northern boys who had never seen a black man in their life to kill and die. It’s what the American Revolution was all about, what was true and can be true again.

What can beat Bushism? Nothing but your courage, your selflessness, and that of your children. Nothing but your idealism, and your willingness to lay it on the line for those ideals.

I find it expressed best in a song written by Gene Scheer, American Anthem. Premiered in 1999, it found its best use as the "love theme" of Ken Burns’ The War, where it was sung by Norah Jones (above).

Let them say of me I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I received.

It’s the one answer we have for Bushism. These are the "better angels" of which Lincoln spoke.

Their time has come again.