Driving Votes: Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." --Karl Marx

Bush the Father, Bush the Son. Gulf War I, Gulf War II. George H.W. Bush unelected in 1992, George W. Bush unelected in 2004.

Let's hope so.

When Marx wrote the above words, he was referring to Louis Bonaparte, the cheap sequel of Napoleon I. Napoleon I had turned a young French republic into a dictatorship in 1799. His nephew, Louis Bonaparte, in another coup d'etat, did it again fifty years later.

Different country, different century, same old story. George W. Bush, who lost the 2000 election and then used well-positioned political cronies to overturn the voters' decision, seize the Oval Office and establish a Bush dynasty in the Greatest Democracy on Earth, was an armed militia short of executing America's first ever coup d'etat.

The difference is that this time around, Episode 2 feels less like farce and more like the end of the world. Bush the Father, whatever else you might say about the man, was at least legitimately elected to office. And his brand of conservativism was moderate -- indeed, too moderate for the taste of the fanatical right-wing core of his party, which abandoned his reelection effort and then compensated for the loss of the White House by hoisting Newt Gingrich's freshman Republican gang to Congress in 1994.

Bush the Son must have been taking notes. During the Florida vote count debacle, the talking heads unanimously declared that whoever should win, he will be forced to close the political rift in the polity by governing from the center. Those of us who believed this nonsense (myself included) had made the mistake of assuming that the Bush team had a modicum of respect for public opinion.

Silly us. Bush spent his first hundred days in office putting together the most reactionary neo-conservative cabinet the country has ever seen. He then, among other things, torpedoed the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, announced his intention to allow oil companies to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Arctic Refuge, and, ridiculously, withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in order to resurrect the rotting carcass of a "Star Wars"-style missile defense shield straight out of 1983. (Now THERE we have the second time as farce. At least in the movie version, the sequel was better than the first one.) All of this before September 11, 2001.

Bush had revealed his true face, a much uglier one than his father's. It was only after 9/11, however, that we got the chance to see just how much uglier it could get. Now, two invasions and a $500 billion deficit later, the second time looks far more tragic than the first.

Let's just make sure it ends the same way.