Scott McLemee: Shrub Studies
[Scott McLemee writes for Inside Higher Ed.]
Next week, Crown Publishers will issue President George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, covering what the former president calls “eight of the most consequential years in American history,” which seems like a fair description. They were plenty consequential. To judge from the promotional video, Bush will plumb the depths of his insight that it is the role of a president to be “the decider.” Again, it’s hard to argue with his point -- though you have to wonder if he shouldn’t let his accumulated wisdom ripen and mellow for a while before serving it.
Princeton University Press has already beat him into print with The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian E. Zelizer, who is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. The other 10 contributors are professors of history, international relations, law, and political science, and they cover the expected bases -- the “War on Terror,” the invasion of Iraq, social and economic policy, religion and race. It is a scholarly book, which means that it is bound to make everybody mad. People on the left get angry at remembering the Bush years, while those on the right grow indignant that anyone still wants to talk about them. So the notion that they were consequential is perhaps not totally uncontroversial after all.
The contributors make three points about the Bush administration’s place in the history of American conservatism that it may be timely to sum up, just now.
In the introduction, Zelizer writes that Bush’s administration “marked the culmination of the second stage in the history of modern conservatism.” The earlier period, running from the 1940s through the ‘70s, had been a time of building an effective movement out of ideological factions (fundamentalists, libertarians, and neoconservatives, among others) “none of which sat very comfortably alongside any other.” Following Reagan's victory in the 1980 election, “conservatives switched from being an oppositional force in national politics to struggling with the challenges of governance that came from holding power.”...
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
Next week, Crown Publishers will issue President George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, covering what the former president calls “eight of the most consequential years in American history,” which seems like a fair description. They were plenty consequential. To judge from the promotional video, Bush will plumb the depths of his insight that it is the role of a president to be “the decider.” Again, it’s hard to argue with his point -- though you have to wonder if he shouldn’t let his accumulated wisdom ripen and mellow for a while before serving it.
Princeton University Press has already beat him into print with The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian E. Zelizer, who is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. The other 10 contributors are professors of history, international relations, law, and political science, and they cover the expected bases -- the “War on Terror,” the invasion of Iraq, social and economic policy, religion and race. It is a scholarly book, which means that it is bound to make everybody mad. People on the left get angry at remembering the Bush years, while those on the right grow indignant that anyone still wants to talk about them. So the notion that they were consequential is perhaps not totally uncontroversial after all.
The contributors make three points about the Bush administration’s place in the history of American conservatism that it may be timely to sum up, just now.
In the introduction, Zelizer writes that Bush’s administration “marked the culmination of the second stage in the history of modern conservatism.” The earlier period, running from the 1940s through the ‘70s, had been a time of building an effective movement out of ideological factions (fundamentalists, libertarians, and neoconservatives, among others) “none of which sat very comfortably alongside any other.” Following Reagan's victory in the 1980 election, “conservatives switched from being an oppositional force in national politics to struggling with the challenges of governance that came from holding power.”...