A Confederacy of Cronies
Commentary: Ruling by corporate fiat is no way to run a democracy.
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Character matters, Bill Clinton's critics asserted in the far-off years of his administration. It was true then -- even after his congressional enemies turned it into a self- fulfilling prophecy -- and it still is. What defines his successor's political character more than anything is not intellectual shortcomings or inherited privileges, but the fact that well into his 40s he had no experience other than in business. The last president of whom something similar could be said was Herbert Hoover. But Hoover was a businessman in the 19th-century sense -- he made his fortune in the wide-open field of mining engineering in far-flung posts around the world, and he was a true believer in laissez-faire individualism. He also retained a turn-of-the-century Progressive's idea of public service and became an international hero after World War I by coordinating the effort to feed the starving across Europe. What destroyed him after he became president in 1929, wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, "was not a sudden failure of personal capacity but the collapse of the world that had produced him and shaped his philosophy."
The world that produced George W. Bush did not collapse in 2002, but it trembled and revealed the flawed foundation beneath his -- it can't be called a philosophy, but it amounts to a set of unexamined assumptions about his world. And what is that world, what are those assumptions?
Too much ridicule of a fake-populist strain is heaped on Bush's pedigree; being the scion of aristocrats would be the best thing about him if only that tradition hadn't decayed and lost its noblesse oblige. He's neither an individualist in the Hoover grain nor an enlightened patrician like Theodore Roosevelt. What made Bush is crony capitalism: business as an end in itself, not as a way of furthering any larger goals, and conducted on the basis of personal connections, so that what matters is trust between "good men," not good institutions (none of this is changed by the fact that as a businessman, Bush wasn't a very good one). Unlike Hoover, whose opposition to government intervention in the economy was so rigid it cost him his job and his reputation, Bush has nothing in principle against it. In fact, his career in both business and politics has been built on a willingness to blur the distinction between public and private spheres -- not to further public goals, but always for private interest.
Ronald Reagan presented unbridled capitalism as a fulfillment of the freedoms promised in America's founding documents. But conservative ideology has deteriorated in the years since Reagan, and for Bush the free market has no higher purpose than self-assertion and stock options. His public inarticulateness has less to do with intelligence, which comes in many different varieties, than with the fact that he's against ideas. The most accurate historical comparison is with the president under whom Hoover served as commerce secretary, Warren G. Harding, who said, "This is essentially a business country," before his administration sank in a cesspool of scandals.
The business scandals of this past summer have edged close to the White House, but it's a mistake to focus on possible securities violations committed 14 years ago or potential misconduct by the vice president when he ran Halliburton. What matters isn't so much whether Bush or Cheney did something illegal -- it's the outlook implied in their legal activities.
At the start of the Bush administration we heard a good deal about the first "ceo presidency" and "America Inc." The notion -- a recurring one in American politics -- was that can-do corporate chiefs are better suited to solving national problems than squabbling politicians who, as the phrase goes, "never met a payroll." Since the collapse of Enron the business metaphors have been dropped, but the nature of the administration remains the same. The single-minded values that made chief executives like John Chambers and Sandy Weill into culture idols in the '90s now inform most of the executive branch: secretive, hierarchical, unwilling to discuss, contemptuous of compromise, unashamedly cozy with friends, dismissive of doubters, ruthless with opponents. If it wasn't clear during the Florida recount that the Bush team deeply dislikes democracy, it has become clear enough since they began to govern.
Businessmen are valued for being practical, for their ability to assess changing circumstances and adapt quickly in order to stay in the game. But when businessmen go into politics, their bottom-line mentality suddenly disappears. What's striking about the Bush administration is its utter inflexibility. The answer to every economic problem is tax cuts for the upper brackets; the answer to every foreign policy problem is assertion of American strength. The administration has persisted in these views long after the political damage became so great that most other administrations would have changed course.
An aggressive CEO would look at the balance sheets of the Bush budget projections and inform his board that the corporation needed to change its entire business plan (unless he was a bad apple, in which case he would instruct his CFO to create a partnership to hide the deficits -- and in its efforts to hide the effect of tax cuts on budget projections, Bush's budget office has actually tried to do something similar). But politics, unlike business, exists in a realm where numbers can be explained away or even talked out of existence. The same arrogance with which a CEO will eliminate thousands of jobs to keep profits at targeted levels characterizes the Bush administration, except that, liberated from the constraints of the bottom line, cold-blooded pragmatism has turned into unreasoning rigidity. By contrast, Reagan, the ideologue, was supple and opportunistic.
All of this would matter less if Bush's presidency had come during the stock-market decade, when Americans stopped paying attention to politics except for the viciously domestic kind. But the first decade of the new century, bringing crises at home and abroad, is shaping up to look more like the 1910s or the 1940s than the 1920s or the 1990s. Certain eras -- it was true of all these -- have a way of producing the kind of leader they need or deserve. But the two great events of Bush's presidency have shown the inadequacy of business as a model for governance. In the case of corporate scandals the reasons are obvious, and no one should have been surprised by the president's attempts to make it a case of "bad apples" until events stampeded him. The only comfort he can take from the fiasco is that the deeper flaws in a deregulated economy were left untouched by legislation. But one senses that these issues have only begun to show their true scope, and that President Bush will be fending them off for years to come.
The War on Terrorism has taken a more surprising turn. A year ago there was an assumption, even among some Democrats, that Republicans are better suited to handle things like a war in Afghanistan, and the rest of the country should leave the experts alone to take care of Osama and Mullah Omar. Today, the administration's strategy is in serious trouble -- the public confused by policy and spooked by promiscuous alerts, allies skeptical, enemies undefeated and beginning to regather strength, anti-American feeling on the rise all over the world.
There are complex reasons for these turnarounds, but beneath them lies the fact that the Bush administration has been unable -- has scarcely tried -- to articulate what this war is for. What are the political goals? What principles are at stake? What kind of world should it try to achieve? But this administration isn't interested in political discussion, let alone cooperative action. By default it's become a war for American security. Such limited, self-interested terms have left those parts of the world that expressed varieties of solidarity after September 11 unsure what's at stake for them. More and more, this is our war alone, and the more the administration tries rhetorically to back out of the blind alley it's led us into, the less credible it sounds.
What this war ought to be for is democracy. But it's democracy that the Bush administration doesn't trust. The lack of any effort to tap the outpouring of civic energy that flowed after the attacks wasn't a missed opportunity -- it was a deliberate decision taken by leaders who see no benefit in an active citizenry, who have no notion of citizenship at all, since in the worldview of business we're all investors and consumers. The message has been "Let us handle it" -- the same message given about corporate fraud when the administration tried to keep the regulators out.
But the War on Terrorism was bound to lose support around the world if it wasn't connected to broad concerns that affect the lives of people who live in neither New York nor Kabul. The struggle against political Islamism is a nearly worldwide one, and it needs to be waged with thoughtfulness and subtlety as well as resolve. It isn't a clash of civilizations, but it is a war of ideas, and they come down to the almost century-old conflict between totalitarianism and liberalism. For America to persuade people around the world that this is their struggle too, and that the side of liberalism is where their hope lies, we would need to be led by people who believe in this idea, or in some idea. Character, it turns out, matters a lot.
Illustration: John Kascht
