George W. Bush: Last President of the 20th Century
George W. Bush is the ultimate President of the 20th century, not the first President of the 21st. On his watch the social cleavages exposed and deepened by the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the conservative counter revolution of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the international political uncertainties produced by the ending of the Cold War have all come to a head. Until these uncertainties are resolved, we continue to live haunted by the legacy of the last century, unable to clearly perceive what 21st century man will be about.
After reading the book, the editor of History News Network asked me if I would write an essay expounding on this theme. That was the genesis of this article.
By stating that George W. Bush is the ultimate president of the 20th century, I did not mean that I considered him to be greatest president of the past hundred years in terms of accomplishment or popularity (though I did postulate at the conclusion of the book that he may well be the most significant Republican politician since Lincoln—but that is grist for a different essay). Nor did I label him as a 20th century president simply because his election fell in the last months of that century. My point was and is that the presidency of George W. Bush represents the summation—or encapsulation, if you please—of the overarching political debate, both of matters domestic and foreign, that dominated the United States in the 20th century. The great national debate of the last century focused on two core issues. First, how great a role a democratic government should take in the lives of its citizens. Second, how great a role should the government of the United States take in the affairs of the world. The policies and programs of the Bush presidency have, to date, represented a continuation of this 20th century debate and not the commencement of a new 21st century dialogue. His presidency may well mark the tipping point in this debate, one way or another or, more likely, the point at which such debate becomes overwhelmed by new forces and processes and, hence, becomes increasingly irrelevant.
The cornerstone notion of American society as a liberal-capitalist state based on individual liberty, democratic processes and free markets was never seriously challenged by either the reactionary right nor radical left across the last century. The key domestic component of this debate was to what lengths the government of the people and by the people might go to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare for the people. Teddy Roosevelt ushered in the American century with a Republican commitment to progressive liberalism, the idea of the people using their government to create a fairer playing field for all by limiting the excessive power and wealth some might derive under conditions of unfettered capitalism. Progressive liberalism also sought to provide economic protection to individuals from the worst excesses of the free market. From Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting to Franklin Roosevelt’s ending of union busting and the weaving together of the New Deal social welfare safety net, the Progressive movement became the instrument by which the newly emerging American industrial middle class rose to national political dominance. Such progressive liberalism remained the dominant national consensus from Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a consensus accepted and expounded upon by both Democrat and Republican presidents alike.
The Reagan-Bush-Clinton years marked a roll back in American commitment to the progressive liberal consensus. An American public made more confident by the successes and prosperity of the immediate post-war decades became progressively less confident and optimistic in the capacity of government to protect it from the rising uncertainties of the dawning post-industrial age. As American blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s and white collar workers in the 1980s and 1990s saw the American dream of job security, Social Security and prosperity security eroded by rising global competition their faith in government to continue to deliver on the progressive liberal promise declined. Thus the Reagan conservative consensus that government, itself, had become a large part of the problem and pairing back government was at least part of the solution, emerged as dominant over the old progressive liberal consensus, with even Democratic President Bill Clinton acknowledging that the “age of big government is over.”
George W. Bush came into office (and won reelection) with a trifurcated electorate: a quarter in support of Bush and his policies, a quarter in opposition and almost half nonplussed enough not to even vote. As President, Bush has aggressively sought to continue and expand the Reagan Consensus politics of rolling back progressive liberalism and truncating the future reach of government by creating massive government deficits spurred by increased spending, particularly on foreign policy, and significant long-term tax cuts. This “starve the beast” approach to government, depriving future congresses and administrations of policy options due to unsustainable budget deficits, has been a direct continuation of policies effectively begun in 1981. The administration’s “bold” attempt to radically recast Social Security from an entitlement into an annuity further underscores the president’s commitment to rolling back the legacy of 20th century progressive liberalism and represents a continuation of the struggle to delineate a clear boundary of government that has raged across American politics for 75 years. It does not, however, mark the emergence of a new consensus as to how to deal with the new problems presented to America by the 21st century.
Take two examples: Social Security reform and education policy. On the issue of Social Security, the president remains fixated on the 20th century notion of back-loading the social safety net to the final decades in life (by which time citizens have already had decades of employment and savings to establish their own retirement security). Twenty-first century options especially given consideration of an aging workforce, might consider front-loading such Social Security, investing more in creating the productive workforce of tomorrow so that they can better provide for their own retirement security. Such front-loading would address the key impediments younger workers face in achieving financial stability: increasing costs of acquiring skills due to rising education costs and the increasing costs associated with family-rearing, from affordable housing to costly medical care to downward pressures on wages.
President Bush, with his “No Child Left Behind” policy, has sought (with mixed results) to improve the performance of American K-12 public education. Yet the president is working to maintain a 20th century model of education. America embraced publicly funded universal primary school education in the 19th century and publicly funded universal secondary education in the 20th century. That the U.S. might, in the 21st century, consider embracing publicly funded universal post-secondary education—free college access of at least some level – for all American workers as a necessity to maintain global economic competitiveness and to maximize worker productivity is a 21st century option not even on the table. Thus, on the domestic front, George W. Bush continues to fight the battles of the 1930's through the 1980's: progressive v. conservative, federalists v. states' righters (which brings one to ponder for what does it gain a man to secure autonomy for his state capitol even as global power moves beyond the reach of even national capitols?)
President Bush’s foreign policy, meanwhile, represents the ultimate 20th century ambivalence of American conservatives toward the power of the state. While seeking to limit the power of government domestically, the Bush Administration has dramatically sought to expand U.S. government power globally. In so doing, however, the Bush administration continues to apply a 20th century nation-state framework to the increasingly post-national world of the 21st century.
The participation of many members of the Bush Administration, for example, in the organization “Project for a New American Century” underscores a fundamental commitment of the Administration to what International Relations specialists would refer to as Hegemonic Stability Theory – the notion that the world order is most stable when guided by one benevolent (hopefully) hegemon, a la 19th century Pax Britannia or post-WWII Pax Americana. This worldview is predicated on the assumption that the world community consists of rationally discrete nation state actors and that all meaningful global relationships of politics, economics and power are “international” – between such national actors.
21st century realities, however, increasingly indicate that non-national actors, be they multinational corporations or international non-governmental organizations, from Toyota and Microsoft to Doctors With Out Borders to Al Qaeda, are playing increasingly important roles in global relations and doing so increasingly beyond national affiliation. The old assumptions that the United States speaks for all its constituent economic interest groups – that what’s good for the United States is good for Microsoft or General Motors—increasingly does not hold. Or, as the novelist John Grisham observed, the real problem in international relations today is that Coca Cola doesn’t have a seat on the Security Council. Just as Great Britain continued to adhere to 19th century ideals of empire well into the twentieth century, after such ideals ceased to be relevant, the United States continues to adhere to ideas of nation-state dominance into the 21st century, just as those ideals seem to be increasingly less relevant.
Nowhere is this commitment to applying 20th century principles more evident than in the administration’s War on Terror. On 9/11 members of a transnational political movement named Al Qaeda using non-traditional methods of terror – box cutters and jet planes, attacked the United States. The Bush administration’s response to this non-traditional form of aggression was to wage traditional war against two nation states – Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush’s entire framing of the issue of terror as a “war” underscored this essentially 20th century view of a quintessentially 21st century problem. Wars are fought between nations. All of the rules of warfare are predicated upon this conceptualization. (Notice how the fact that many of the participants in the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, not falling neatly into categorizations based on national affiliation in wars between nations, ended up falling through the legal cracks in terms of their treatment as prisoners of these wars.)
The formation of global terrorism, however, is transnational, with fluid and dispersed groups operating across national boundaries, loosely analogous to the multinational corporations that such politically violent groups often form in reaction to. As numerous terrorist experts have argued, targeting specific national governments for retribution for terrorist actions does little to address the underlying dynamic of either the formation or function of terrorist groups. Presented with a new transnational 21st century, challenge to American and global security, President Bush has reacted within a 20th century strategic framework. Even the president’s laudable goal for universal democratic national elections falls into the trap of thinking that regional or global problems affected by a myriad of national and transnational actors can be ultimately dealt with one country at a time. An Iraq holding democratic elections is, by any measure, far better for the Iraqi people than an Iraq under dictatorship. An Iraq successfully integrated economically and politically with a global system that fosters economic prosperity and political stability for all its participants, national and otherwise, would be even better for the people of Iraq. And everyone else.
The United States entered the 21st century suffering from an identity malaise. The collapse of the Soviet Union has left the U.S. as the single greatest national power at precisely the same historical moment when national power--the measure of all things for the last half millennium--is on the wane in the global scheme of things. President George W. Bush has actively sought to resolve the key unresolved debates of the 20th century. Doing so makes him the ultimate, as in final, 20th century president. The real lesson of 9/11, however, is that with each passing year, new realities -- be they terrorists with box cutters, Sherpas with cell phones, Internet Jihadists, global warming, endless outsourcing, resource depletion or McDonaldization -- are increasingly rendering the big debates of the 20th century less and less relevant to the survival and prosperity of mankind in the 21st century.