The President's Truth

by Jeff Siegel

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes of the “emancipation of thought from experience” – that is, that ideology in a totalitarian system is more important in determining reality than experience. Once this premise is accepted, she writes, anything is possible. Hence, the defendants in the Soviet show trials in the 1930s could plead guilty even though they weren’t, because Soviet ideology taught that guilt and innocence were bourgeois concepts that didn’t exist in the Soviet system. The party accused them, so they must be guilty.

Which brings us to the Bush administration.

The point is not that the president is a Stalinist (or a Nazi, the other subject of Arendt’s study). For all of his flaws, and there are many, George W. Bush hasn’t sent his own citizens to death camps. Rather, it’s that Arendt’s book offers an insight into the administration’s behavior, which does seem to exist in a reality all of its own. Use her perspective, and the Bush ideology – a combination of 1920s corporate boosterism, neo-liberal foreign policy, and Nixonian executive privilege – explains why the administration does what it does. It still doesn’t make sense in any objective sort of fashion, but that’s as irrelevant to the administration as guilt or innocence was to the show trial participants.

We have a president who has said that he has never made a mistake, which dovetails with Arendt’s thesis that truth flows from the leader. Stalin said Moscow had the only subway in the world, so it was true -- even though there were subways in New York, Paris and London. Understand this, and it explains not just why the president says we’re winning the war in Iraq, but why we won’t lose it. The administration’s ideology will not allow it. It’s not that failure is not an option. It’s that failure doesn’t exist, in the same way that those other subways didn’t exist.

This is crucial to understanding the mess we’re in, not only in Iraq, but domestically, in our relations with the rest of the world, and in issues like global warming. The administration does what it does because it is the source of Truth. Nothing else matters: not whether climate studies are accurate; not whether we are losing allies because they question our findings on weapons of mass destruction; and certainly not U.N. surveys that say Poland’s children are better off than ours. It’s why Bush can give speeches, with a straight face, about the evils of corporate corruption and excessive executive pay. That his policies, like gutting the Securities and Exchange Commission, helped make these things possible is, again, as irrelevant as the London subway.

The one good thing about all this? We only have 21 months of it left, and we can get rid of it without suffering through what the Russians and Germans went through. Which, actually, is a pretty good thing.

(Editorial graphic "Sic Semper Tyrannis" by Darkblack using a Creative Commons license via Flickr. More visual commentary by Darkblack can be found here.)

Bush administration
George Bush
politics
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