Beyond Ridicule, Beyond Lying (Part II)

All right, I raised the issue of whether or not Bush is evil. A lot of the people who oppose the war think he is...

Bush is interested in power, and he has no understanding of democracy.

In the previous post I wrote: Bush and his advisors are not bad leaders because they are bad people, or because they are evil. They are bad leaders because they don't know how to lead. They are incompetent and they have no judgment. I came back to that topic while I was running on Saturday. These thoughts are in the form of a postscript to that post.

I said that Bush and his advisors were not bad people, and I traced their poor leadership to incompetence and poor judgment. But there are two more things about Bush and his group that are more insidious and scary. First, Bush and his inner circle are primarily interested in power, not leadership. Leadership and power are not the same thing. (Hannah Arendt distinguishes between power and authority in On Revolution.) Power gives you the ability to make people do what they don't want to do. Good leaders give people the will and energy to do what they want to do, but find it difficult to do on their own. Good leadership is not coercive, it is persuasive.

Well, back to Bush and company - or I should say, back to Karl Rove and company. Karl Rove and George Bush are not interested in leadership. They are interested in consolidating the power of the Republican party. They do not see a connection between winning the war and uniting the whole country. That is, they do not see uniting the whole country as an essential condition for winning the war. Rather, they use the war to enhance the strength of their own party. You would expect them to use such tactics during the presidential election of 2004. This pattern of behavior extends beyond the reelection campaign, though. Bush would like to unite as many people as he can behind his foreign policy, but his focus has been on Republican unity, not American unity.

The second quality, or failing, grows out of the first. Bush and his advisors do not understand democracy. The two clearest examples of this quality concern torture and warrantless wiretaps. They do not see democratic constraints - natural rights that limit government's power to do certain things - as constraints that balance the imperatives of national security. That is, if national security seems to require a certain course of action, that is it. There is no more argument. National security trumps the limits on governmental power with no more argument necessary.

Well, what can you do in a situation like this? The administration's actions indicate that it doesn't recognize any limits on its power in the area of national security. If that is the case, then we have a terrible case of: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. A sincere desire to protect the American people has led the administration into the corruption of unchecked power. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," is one of the most famous sayings in political thought. If it applies here - and evidence indicates that it does - then our government has suffered the absolute corruption that seemed impossible before 9/11.

I truly don't want to admit that our government is evil. But evil is banal in so many ways. It doesn't always come at you with a blood-drenched scimitar. It shows up in small ways and progresses until you can't escape it...

Back once more to the team that pretends to lead us, but actually does whatever it thinks best, whether or not it is in the country's long-term interest.

Here is the best evidence that the administration is not interested in leadership. It says that its opponents are traitors, that people who disagree with it are helping our enemies. It is ready to turn us against ourselves, to divide us so it may conquer the whole. It can succeed without our friends in Muslim countries. It can succeed without our European allies and without the United Nations. It can succeed without the loyal opposition at home. All of its actions point to one source of success: the power of its own party, the ability to force its way on others.

By letting this government continue, we have reached a true turning point. People still act as if we are living in the democracy we had before 9/11, but we're not. We've allowed our fears to affect the kind of country we are. One of our main qualities in the past was fearlessness. Now we've let fear make us ready to give up our democratic way of life. That's why we have to shrug off 9/11. If we shrug it off, we won't fear our enemies any more. If we shrug it off, we won't care about what they do to us. We'll just destroy them. We'll find out who they are, where they are, and we'll just destroy them.

That's how you have to fight a war - with ruthlessness and with determination. Yes, there's fear, but you shrug that off, too. Where are the leaders who help us face fear and forget it, rather than monger fear for the sake of their own advantage? Where are the leaders who help us face fear and forget it, rather than divide us and make us fear even each other? Where are the leaders who unite us, and help us defeat those who want to destroy us? I tell you, you will not find them among the members of the current administration. They think they are brave and resolute, but they are cowardly incompetents. They think they protect us, but they destroy everything worth protecting. They think they are truthful, but they don't even know what the truth is. They think they will be proven correct in the end, but in fact historians will record a hundred years from now that they caused the loss of our democracy. And we let them do it.