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Chris Bickerton
posted 12 October 2006

Sidney Blumenthal was an advisor to President Clinton in the 1990s. As he writes in his acknowledgements page, 'I spent years working in the White House. When I read or hear about the Oval Office my mind inevitably visualizes it' (pxi). How Bush Rules: Chronologies of a Radical Regime is a collection of Blumenthal's articles, written for the Guardian and Salon, covering the period stretching from November 2003 to April 2006.

At a time when Republicans are publicly supporting a Democrat victory in the forthcoming mid-term elections, and when, as leading conservative intellectual William F Buckley claims, Bush lacks an 'effective conservative ideology', Blumenthal's title might seem a little quixotic. Francis Fukuyama, with his book, After the Neocons, seems to have jumped ship just in time. In fact, this is one of the main weaknesses of Blumenthal's book. His articles recount the difficulties the Bush administration has faced in establishing its authority, given its inauspicious beginnings in 2000. Yet at the same time, the underlying theme of Blumenthal's writings are that Bush has been the most radical president since Roosevelt, and that he is on the verge of transforming American politics and society. As Blumenthal writes in his epilogue, 'ironically, the more Bush tries to entrench his imperial presidency, the weaker he becomes' (p402). For anyone wanting to work out the logic behind this 'irony', Blumenthal provides no satisfactory answer.

It may be unfair to upbraid Blumenthal for leaving paradoxes unexplained. His book is not intended as an analytical tour de force, but rather a collection of articles, with only 20-odd pages of new material. As a journalistic collection, the book works relatively well. Blumenthal's connections and first-hand experience of American politics provide a wealth of detail, both anecdotal and document-based. The collection is also exhaustive. Virtually all of the events that have marked the end of Bush's first term, and the beginning of his second are cited by Blumenthal. In his account of them, Blumenthal brings in useful quotes and off-the-record comments: the stuff of good journalism. The critique of the administration from insiders such as Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neil is nicely contextualised; Clarke shows that terrorism was at the forefront of Clinton's mind as President, yet ignored initially by the incoming Bush administration. Blumenthal's descriptions of leading figures in American politics are evocative and cutting: from his account of the rise of Bernard Kerik through the ranks of the New York Police Department, all the way to the nomination for secretary of the Homeland Security department, to his mocking description of Arnold Schwarzenegger's address to the 2004 Republican National Congress.

For all this, in the transition from journalist to author Blumenthal might have developed his thinking. There is a twenty-three page introduction added onto the collection of articles, but no substantial new material. The articles themselves appear not to have been synthesised or reworked in any way. Repetitions spring up throughout the text, sometimes so frequently that an event is mentioned repeatedly within the space of only a few pages. On page 127, we learn of the Bush government firing Brent Scowcroft as chair of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. On page 130, the same event is described again. The New York Times' mea culpa over publishing falsehoods by Iraqi exile, Ahmad Chalabi, and the Washington Times' refusal to apologise for its own misleading editorials over weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, is repeated. We hear more than once about Dick Cheney's threat to the UN weapons inspector Hans Blix: 'we will not hesitate to discredit you'. The Vietnam veterans who were mobilised prior to the 2004 election to discredit John Kerry's military record also crop up more than once. These repetitions even contradict each other. Blumenthal writes on page 72 that seventeen people were killed in the explosions at the UN mission in Baghdad in August 2003; on page 90 we read that the 19 August bombing killed 22.

To the larger questions raised by the Bush presidency, Blumenthal provides few answers. Most problematically, he does not address a basic contradiction. On the one hand, he describes Bush's presidency as 'uniquely radical', 'based on a deliberate strategy to change the presidency and government fundamentally and forever' (p20). On the other hand, he provides countless examples of the incoherence and lack of direction of this same 'regime'. In his collection of articles, Bush and the 'neocons' are painted as wilful, radical and ruthless. They 'operate with a Leninist sensibility: following a party line, engaging in fierce polemics, using harsh invective, and showing equal contempt for traditional Republics and liberal Democrats' (p9). Yet, the administration is at the same time weak, paralysed by inner divisions and individual incompetence. Blumenthal writes of the 'inner workings of Bush's White House' in the first term: Bush himself is 'aggressive and manipulated, ignorant of his own policies and their consequences'; Colin Powell is 'proud' yet 'constantly in retreat', Dick Cheney qua Cardinal Richelieu is 'the power behind the throne', and Condoleezza Rice, as National Security Advisor, is 'vulnerable', 'deceitful and derelict', 'an underhanded lightweight' (p51).

On policy, Blumenthal cites a report by the Defence Science Board task force on strategic communication, produced by a Pentagon advisory panel, which highlighted a 'crisis' within those institutions responsible for the prosecution of the War on Terror. In the words of the report, 'missing are strong leadership, strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of measurement and evaluation' (p119). Elsewhere, he points to the Bush administration's flight from reality during the 2004 election campaign. In Blumenthal's words, 'Bush… must evade, deny and suppress [reality]. His true opponent is not his Democratic foe… but events' (p107). Blumenthal also writes of the 'vacuum of [Bush's] second term', barely obscured by his profile as 'war president' (p85). At the same time, he does not shy away from asserting the historical importance of the Bush presidency: 'nothing like Bush's concerted radicalism has ever been seen in the White House. One would have to go back to the Civil War era to find politics as polarized' (p22).

Reading the articles, a few unexplored explanations for this contradiction appear. Blumenthal suggests, for instance, that the problem stems from Bush's faith-based politics. By casting his actions in terms of his own Christian faith, Bush has made the War on Terror into 'a clash of civilizations'. The sense that the US is waging a war against Muslims, Blumenthal writes, 'is precisely the message that incites Islamic terrorists in their jihad against the Christian crusader' (p402). As a result, 'policy and politics are at cross purposes' (p403); Bush's radicalism is the source of his administration's incompetence. Another explanation focuses on Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary. According to Blumenthal, these two are behind the rise of the 'imperial presidency': the 'elevation of absolute executive power' and 'dismissal of other branches of government'*. Blumenthal notes specifically that 'since the Nixon administration, when counsellor Rumsfeld and his deputy Cheney watched the self-destruction of the president, they have plotted to reach the point where they could impose the imperial presidency that evaded Nixon' (p401). Finally, in accounting for the origins of the 'neoconservative moment' itself, Blumenthal locates its origins in Texas. What distinguishes Bush's presidency are its roots: he is 'the first Southern conservative ever elected to the presidency', and via Bush, 'a reactionary Southern political tradition captured the centre of the federal government'. Bush's 'brand of conservatism is the expression of a commodity-based oligarchy rooted in Texas, deeply hostile to the New Deal, actively dismissive of public services, and protective of class and racially based hierarchies' (p20).

None of these explanations make much sense of the evolution of the Bush regime. Blumenthal himself notes that Bush was elected in 2000 after a campaign waged around effacing as much as possible the differences between himself and Gore. Such a convergence of programmes goes some way to explain the legal wrangling at election time: when there is so little to distinguish candidates, we can expect a tight result. On Blumenthal's reading, the 2000 election was pure dissimulation: radicals hiding behind the mantle of 'compassionate conservatism'. At the same time, the focus on the dominance of personalities such as Cheney and Rumsfeld begs the question: under what circumstances is politics reduced to merely the self-interested pursuit of power for its own sake? This is the same question that recent events in the UK have provoked: what has happened to British politics for it to coalesce so resolutely around the personalities of Blair and Brown?

It is impossible to answer such questions with anecdotes and insider information. It poses starkly the question about legitimacy and consent, and the ways in which the forms of rule adopted by governments reflect their relationship with society. In the case of the Bush administration, it was elected under exceptional circumstances: a Supreme Court decision decided Bush's political fate. He became president in spite of having lost the popular vote. Moreover, that popular vote was itself marred by high rates of abstention. This posed the question of legitimacy from the outset. We can think of the administration's subsequent evolution in terms of responding to such a position of weakness, rather than the inexorable rise of an all-powerful 'neocon' cabal.

Political power in a democracy rests upon the consent of the governed, and consent is what animates institutions. Ruling in the absence of consent, or when consent is severely attenuated, leaves governments little alternative but to recast their authority in ways outside conventional channels of representation. The Bush administration has practised a politics of retrenchment: falling back on ideological certainties, patronage, and cannibalising other spheres of government. Its opportunistic reliance upon the War on Terror as a source of authority has been another sign of its desperation. These are all signs of weakness rather than strength. Far from perfecting a form of authoritarian populist rule, as Blumenthal argues, the Bush administration, and his Republican Party, have found it increasingly difficult to maintain their coherence. A sign of the peculiarity of the times is that it is still by no means certain that the scandal-hit Republicans will be defeated at the polls by the Democrat opposition. More dangerous are internal splits. As British journalist Andrew Sullivan noted recently, 'it turns out that the US does have a functioning opposition party after all. It's called the authentically conservative wing of the Republicans'.

Chris Bickerton is a PhD student at St Johns College, Oxford.

* For a critique of the term 'imperial president' as applied to the Bush administration, see the post, 'Friday Review: Whither the Imperial Presidency?', on the 'Against the War on Terror' blog .