-Caveat Lector-
It's plain to see the Bush Administration is staffed by those who are certain
anything, including personal security and safety, can be purchased with money or
weapons or both.
A Confederacy of Cronies
Ruling by corporate fiat is no way to run a democracy.
by George Packer
November/December 2002
The world that produced George W. Bush did not collapse in 2002, but it trembled
and revealed the flawed foundation beneath hisÉit 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 alwa!
ys 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.
The complete version of A Confederacy of Cronies can be read in the
November/December, 2002 issue of Mother Jones magazine.
Purchase this issue of the magazine
Subscribe to Mother Jones Magazine today
@2002 The Foundation for National Progress
Read the article online:
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/power_plays/2002/45/ma_155_01.html
Check out the latest from Mother Jones at:
http://www.motherjones.com
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