Topic: Failure, the legacy of our era
I have great confidence that when historians 50 years or more from now look at this era, it will be one marked with extreme partisan divison. But besides that, the leaders will be thought of as weak, petty and moreover mostly forgotten like Polk, Tyler and other lame presidents in the era before the so-called Civil War.
It really isn't their fault either because that divison is what makes getting things done hard.
In particular, I believe Bush's legacy will be one of exceptional failure. He will be remembered as a person and a president, like all other leaders are.
As a person, he will be remembered as someone who was exceptionally pragmatic in an era where people were generally theoretical. (It tells you something, something very bad, when the only mention of reality in our culture is in reference to "reality TV", something patently unrealistic.) He will be remembered as a decisive leader, someone that knew what he wanted. Someone driven by results and undeterred by criticism. But to his downfall, someone unable to work well with others. A person so posessed by ideology, that he has become blinded by it. The downfall of what mankind will do for love of country.. including but not limited to hypocrisy, tyranny and bigotry. Someone more drawn in by abstract notions of good and evil rather than the facts and a person not overly concerned with happenings in the world as much as their ideal world. Someone that seems steadfastly oppose to change as long as they view it as a threat to their agenda/ideology.
George W. Bush, as I understand him, is of a personality type that is usually not one that is compatible with a leader: which is a dreamer. Bush refuses to live in reality for the most part, although he'd beg to differ. This lack of leadership ability may or may not have to do with his early failures in life relating to drunk driving incidents, companies going under, a badly produced movie and a relatively mediocre baseball team.
The Presidency of Bush will obviously be remembered in relation to the attacks of September 11th, the ensuing wars, the economic downturn and recovery and Homeland security. Historical budget deficits, tax cuts and massive job loss for a time will also mark the rememberence of the economy. The 2000 election will go down in history as controversial and probably one of the closest ever, if not the closest itself.
But I think more than any foreign, domestic or political event what will be remembered is what we did in response: nothing. We failed, in almost every sense of the word, to grasp the real challenges of our era and address them. As a nation, the entirety of our efforts came to nothing. Our collective progress converged to a zero sum.
Bush's healthcare policies might as well be non-existent. His economic policies other than massive tax cuts might as well also be non-existent. Same with the education, environment and generally everything else.
Save foreign policy and social issues, which appear to be the some of the precious few areas where Bush is interested. This is because neo-conservatism is in general not applicable or is indifferent to those other mentioned issues.
Bush's foreign policy of pre-emption will be remembered as paranoid, unsustainable and largely destructive to its own ends. It will have divided the world in perhaps an unrepairable way. The policies of unilateralism will be remembered as previously failed and failed again when America was arrogant enough to act alone in an arena where by its very nature other nations are involved and ought to be consulted.
The "with us or against us" mentality will be remembered as particularly divisive and furthermore creating of outright hostilities in the world. George W. Bush brought the mentality of the "Old West" in Texas to global politics, front and center stage.
For all of this, we will fail in Iraq. We will fail in Afghanistan and ultimately we will fail to defeat terrorism. We will either learn to live with it or learn to live with it after much war and toil. Either way the outcome is the same, we cannot win and we will not win.
This isn't to stay we will fail miltarily, in Iraq, although we still might. Our ultimate goal of "democratizing" the Middle East however will never be realized. Peace will come, but by no result of these policies. Properity might return, but only after we leave. These are a people we cannot help, as they hate us and by and large we created most of their problems.
Bush's apathy in domestic issues and over-activism in foreign affairs will be remembered for what they will ultimately become: failure.
He will perhaps then be remembered as a man that was not really the President from the popular vote, at a time when the nation was at war for false reasons with something we all did not really understand, to loosely paraphrase the comedian Michael Moore.
