Dear America,
For years now I have been contemplating how the Republican Party has managed to reemerge after being repudiated in the 2006 mid-term elections. That year, the Democrats assumed control of both bodies of congress, and two years later, they took the White House as well, which gave me hope that the American electorate had finally seen some kind of light. But in 2010, just two years after the election of our first president of color, the Republicans took back the House of Representatives and made John Boehner its Speaker, and now, after a drubbing in the Obama presidency's second mid-term elections, the Republicans control both houses of congress with their focus on paternalism--that is, supply-side economics--once again the guiding principle of our federal government. It is laws that control our national course, not the occupant of the White House, who serves no purpose other than to guide the ship of state and execute the laws that congress passes, albeit with some discretion of his own. Despite the concern about executive power in American politics these days, it is congress that sets the domestic course of our nation, though exertion of that power requires univocality in all branches of government. The Supreme Court is almost theirs, requiring just one more conservative justice to make its conservative bent a reliable fait accompli., so that is control of the second of three branches for the Republicans, who tend to be conservative as we all know. And now, Jeb Bush is ramping up his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, trying to paint himself as both the conservative and moderate candidate that the Republicans need to recapture the third branch; the presidency is the last element of political power in America needed for complete Republican dominance of our nation's ethos. But all this precipitates the question of how the American polity has come to submit to the conservative notion that, while government control is inimical to political and economic freedom, the oligarchy of the wealthy can be trusted to distribute Americas weal equitably. Though I have suspected this before, the Jeb Bush campaign, which but for Scott Walker is all but a juggernaut, makes it all clear. The Republican strategy is to sell the American voters a package that comprises mainly, and most overtly, the moral vision that is inherent in conservatism by wrapping it all in pride, omitting the notion that pride is a sin and instead encouraging the conceit that we, as Americans, are something special, and then throwing in supply-side economics as an inseparable part of the package.
It is obvious that such is Bush's strategy in much of what he says, which is rich in cliché but devoid of substantive defense of plutocracy and the basic concept of "American Exceptionalism" that candidates in the Republican Party have for decades invoked as axiomatic in one form or another while the rest of the world sees it as conceit and arrogance. Most recently, Bush has said almost that in his comments about President Obama's geo-political philosophy. Bush wants to resurrect his brother's under girding foreign policy motif by asserting that the United States is a uniformly unquestionable force for some objective good that will serve the world, without reviewing the nature of that good or ever questioning the political and economic forces behind our international goals. It is the teleological equal of Richard Nixon's statement that if the president does it, it is legal. But the rest of the world doesn't subscribe to the notion that if the United States wants it, it is by definition in everyone's best interest. Much of the world sees us as Philistine pillagers who are to be resisted, and that is why the Iraq and Afghanistan wars spawned ISIL and Iranian hegemony in the middle east. No president in a century before Barrack Obama has questioned whether the United States should control the world's ethos by divine right, and it is by diving right that we presume to act, including not just sanctioning and rebuking those who don't comport their conduct with our notions of propriety, but waging war on them for it as well. So now, Republican politicians like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani proclaim that The President doesn't love this country because he eschews the arrogance of conservative thinking. And while Jeb Bush doesn't explicitly so state, he makes it clear that he concurs. It is un-American, he intimates, for our nation to conduct the foreign policy of allowing others to determine their own fates when we, after all, know full well what they should be doing, and furthermore, that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing without American tutelage if not moral fiat. This Bush wants to take us down the same road that the last Bush did, and that is a frightening prospect.
My son texted me a couple of weeks ago and said something like, Jeb Bush might not be too bad. If my son, who waxes liberal to radical most of the time, has been seduced by Jeb's low pressure sales pitch, I imagine that many liberal-leaning independents will vote for him as an alternative to the feckless Democratic Party's submission to the race, and all conservative independents and Republicans will see Bush as a viable version of the pandering, amoral political ambition of Mitt Romney. Bush seems like a good guy, and he knows better than to admit something like one of the Romney contretemps: that he likes Cadillacs...his wife has a couple of them. In the final analysis, Jeb Bush's advantage is that he is what Eric Hoffer, the socio-political philosopher, called a "true-believer," which gives him a good chance of fulfilling his political ambitions, because we are a nation of them.
Your friend,
Mike
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