A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

Moreover, the president has repeatedly contended that the aspiration of the country should be to divine God’s sense of “justice” and act accordingly, i.e., that is how one can be “on the side of” God. Thus, as the president sees it, though God does not send him literal instructions, God does have preferences for the nation that the president can and ought to discern and obey. At a 2004 ceremony commemorating the Day of Prayer, the president put it this way:

  God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice…. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we have faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.

  Bush’s evangelical fervor outweighs all other impulses and principles, including political conservatism. In that regard—and well prior to 9/11—Bush is a fundamentally different conservative, in both belief and temperament, than was Ronald Reagan. Whereas a belief in limited government was (at least ostensibly) Reagan’s overarching principle, Bush entirely subordinates political conservatism to (at most) a secondary consideration, endowing his faith with unchallengeable primacy. When those two belief systems clash, Bush’s religious convictions prevail. As Bush speechwriter David Frum described in his 2003 book, The Right Man:

  Goodness had been one of the main themes of Bush’s campaign speeches. He often observed that if the government could ever write a law that could make people love their neighbors, he would be glad to sign it. This was, when you think about it, an odd thing for a Republican president to say. If Congress had sent Ronald Reagan a law obliging people to love their neighbors, he would have vetoed it as an impertinent infringement of personal liberty, and unconstitutional besides.

  But Bush came from and spoke for a very different culture from that of the individualistic Ronald Reagan: the culture of modern Evangelicalism. To understand the Bush White House you must understand its predominant creed. It was a kindly faith, practical and unmystical.

  Whenever any competing considerations—including political conservatism—conflict with the imperatives of Bush’s theology, his moralistic conceptions prevail. And indeed, placing limitations on government has never been a priority for Bush. To the contrary, he has been committed to an expansion of government power as a means of coercing his conception of the moral Good. In this regard, one can describe Bush’s political philosophy much more accurately as a theory of evangelical governance than as conservatism, reflected by his commitment to use government power as a force to promote his conception of God’s will.

  In his book The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan—once a leading, vocal supporter of the president and the invasion of Iraq—describes the process by which he renounced his support for the Bush presidency. Sullivan came to believe that Bush’s conservatism was a fundamental departure from, and not just a modification of, the Reagan/Thatcher theories of conservatism which attracted him to that movement in the 1980s. To demonstrate this point, Sullivan highlights, as did Frum, the evangelical mission at the heart of the Bush presidency:

  President Reagan’s most famous quote from his 1981 Inaugural Address was the following: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” President George W. Bush explained a markedly different philosophy in September, 2003: “We have a responsibility when somebody hurts, government has to move.”

  According to the president, seeking God’s will and acting in accordance with it drives each of his decisions, particularly the most consequential ones. Bush himself described his mission to Bob Woodward as such:

  “Going into this period [when he ordered the invasion of Iraq], I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will…. I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness.”

  Thus are all of the president’s most significant and most controversial policy decisions grounded in his convictions about God’s will and, in particular, his understanding of what approach to the world God’s will fundamentally requires. The following chapters examine specifically how these Manichean imperatives have been used to justify (both to the president and then by him) the militarism in Iraq, Iran, and the broader Middle East. For instance, the imperative of spreading democracy—no matter the necessary means (including brutal wars) and even in the absence of a connection to anti-American terrorism—is inherently Good and just, because it is in accordance with God’s will; God wills that every man, woman, and child be free, and any measures in pursuit of that ultimate end, including wars, are just and necessary. These policies are not subject to debate or uncertainty in Bush’s mind any more than his faith in God is, because the former stems directly from—is compelled by—the latter.

  These premises operate within a broader belief system whereby Bush has become convinced that his presidency is part of, perhaps the catalyst for, a religious reawakening in the United States and a reemerging religious purpose for the country. And we know that because, among other reasons, the president has said so. In September 2006, the president met with a group of right-wing pundits in the White House. According to their published reports, he spoke extensively of his religious fervor, and particularly of his belief that America was in the midst of what he called a “Third Awakening.” One of the pundits who was present, National Review editor Rich Lowry, wrote:

  The President mentioned that he is struck by the number of people he meets who tell him they are praying for him. He jokingly noted, “Now maybe the only people who pray in America come to my events,” but he wonders if there is evidence of a Third Awakening saying, “It feels like it to me” [emphasis added].

  The First Great Awakening was a wave of Christian fervor that raged in colonial America from about 1730 to 1760; the Second Great Awakening generally refers to a similar religious revival that swept the nation from 1800 to 1830. For the president to predict not merely the imminence of a Third Great Awakening but to proclaim that it is already under way is to posit that religious passion is the predominant attribute of contemporary American life, shaping the thought processes and priorities of most Americans.

  In the same September 2006 meeting, Bush claimed that the most intense support for Abraham Lincoln’s bid to end slavery came from Christians who were the by-product of the Second Awakening and who therefore “saw life in terms of good and evil.” According to Lowry:

  He talked about the two constituencies that faithfully supported President Lincoln, noting that he had recently read extensively about the former President and his own policies aren’t based on his insights (nor obviously does he consider himself another Lincoln). Bush explained that Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people from the Second Awakening “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who agreed with Lincoln that slavery was evil, and the Union soldiers who Lincoln had “great affection and admiration for.”

  Following on those observations, Bush elaborated on his Third Awakening supporters and their similar view—as well as his own—that life should be viewed “in terms of good and evil”:

  A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me…. There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50’s and the ’60’s—boom—and I think there’s change happening here. It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.

  The president’s proclamation of a new religious awakening in America came at a time when his popularity was at a low point and the war in Iraq was increasingly seen to be a debacle. Opposition to the president was so intense before the looming midterm election that Democrats had settled on a strategy of transforming that vote into a specific referendum on the highly unpopular president.

  That the president would take solace in the extraordinary belief that he was presiding over a Third Great Awakening at the very moment he was most under siege is not surprising. He could comfort himself with the assurance that there was such s
trident opposition to him not because he had done anything wrong or because he had erred, but precisely because he had not erred, because he had unyieldingly devoted himself to Good, and was hated for that reason. In an October 2006 Fox interview with Bill O’Reilly, Bush seemed to make exactly that point. He agreed with O’Reilly that many opponents “hate” him because he is “a man of faith”:

  O’REILLY: The secular progressives don’t like you because you’re a man of faith.

  BUSH: Yes.

  O’REILLY: You know that.

  BUSH: Yes. That causes me to be sad for people who don’t like somebody because he happens to believe in the Almighty.

  O’REILLY: Absolutely. They think you are some kind of evangelical. God tells you what to do and you go out and do it. And they hate that.

  BUSH: I guess that I have pity for people who believe that. They don’t understand the relationship between man and the Almighty, then.

  On several other occasions, the president has similarly suggested that his unpopularity was not a sign that he had gone astray and should change, but rather, that he was on a righteous course, and resistance to his policies and presidency were a by-product of his unyielding commitment to battling Evil. He began casting the dissatisfaction with his presidency as a challenge he must overcome—by steadfastly remaining on the moral course.

  Further, and subsequent to the massive Democratic gains in the 2006 midterm election, the president increasingly began invoking the legacy of Harry Truman and claiming that, like Truman, his unpopularity would ultimately lead to his historical vindication. In December 2006, McClatchy’s Washington bureau reported on a tense meeting between the president and various Congressional Democrats poised to take over control of the Congress. Democrats expected the president to explore a new path in Iraq:

  Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S. Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

  Bush said that “in years to come they realized he was right and then his doctrine became the standard for America,” recalled Senate Majority Whip-elect Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “He’s trying to position himself in history and to justify those who continue to stand by him, saying sometimes if you’re right you’re unpopular, and be prepared for criticism.”

  Durbin said he challenged Bush’s analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that’s what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now—work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

  Bush, Durbin said, “reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response” and emphasized that he is “the commander in chief.”

  This incident strikingly illustrates a pattern seen throughout the president’s tenure. The more the president is challenged, the more his policies are deemed to be failures, the more rigidly he digs in and becomes less open and receptive to change.

  The president’s reaction to the 2006 Democratic sweep was also highly illustrative. Virtually all political analysts attributed the election results to the public’s deep dissatisfaction with the Iraq War, yet the president’s response was to order an escalation of the war. He did so despite—or perhaps because of—pervasive opposition to such escalation among virtually all Democrats, the overwhelming majority of most Americans, and even substantial numbers in his own party. As opposition to escalation became overwhelming, the president’s reaction was to dig in further in order to underscore the certainty of his rightness and to emphasize that his war was a moral imperative and would therefore never be subject to compromise.

  BEYOND CONTEMPORARY JUDGMENT

  That the president would dismiss the importance of contemporary public opinion in favor of vindication by “history” seemed particularly confounding in light of the president’s prior claims that historical judgment was irrelevant, or at least unknowable. When promoting his second Bush book, Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward recounted a December 2003 discussion he had had with the president, by which point it was widely assumed that there were no WMDs in Iraq:

  After the second interview with him on Dec. 11, we got up and walked over to one of the doors. There are all of these doors in the Oval Office that lead outside. And he had his hands in his pocket, and I just asked, “Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,” says Woodward.

  And he said, “History,” and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, “History, we won’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

  When the president enjoyed soaring personal approval and his policies were overwhelmingly popular, he could not have been more indifferent, even scornful, toward the notion that history’s verdict on him was worthy of consideration. But once Americans turned against both him and his war, the president sought solace in historical judgment to lend support for his chosen course—support that was so plainly lacking among the citizens of the country he led.

  The shifting, self-contradictory rationales offered by the president as to why he refuses to change course suggest that the justifications for remaining in place do not matter much. When the standard of judgment he uses shifts from affirming his actions to undermining them, he simply seeks out a new, more hospitable standard. The one option he will never consider is that he erred, that his chosen course was wrong. That is because his decisions are rooted in, and dictated by, his faith, and that—by definition—can never be wrong. Thus, anything or anyone that suggests that it is wrong must, for that reason alone, be discarded.

  During the height of Bush’s popularity, in 2002 and 2003, there was very little discussion of the role the president’s evangelical beliefs played in his political and foreign policy decisions. In fact, in a nation that had placed itself squarely and loyally behind the president in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there was little questioning about any of the president’s decisions and virtually no scrutiny of his attributes. The political and journalistic elites in the United States, as well as a solid majority of Americans, had placed their faith in George W. Bush, and as usually is the case whenever faith is in play, there was very little skeptical examination of the president or his conduct.

  But as the president refused to recognize (or, at least, publicly acknowledge) that severe problems were emerging in Iraq, and as his popularity consequently declined precipitously throughout 2004, far more attention was paid to the extent to which the president’s evangelical certainty precluded him from changing course. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative official in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, told Ron Suskind in the weeks before the 2004 election:

  Just in the past few months I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.

  After Bill O’Reilly interviewed the president in October 2006, he observed: “My theory about President Bush is that he is a true believer—he sincerely thinks he is looking out for America in the best ways possible and the polls be damned. That kind of certainty provides solace and calm.”

  In his book The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan explores the differences between the epistemology embraced by religious fundamentalism and that of non-fundamentalist religious adherents (whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or of any other religion):

  The essential claim of the fundamentalist is that he knows the truth. It’s a simple, short phrase, but it would be foolish to underestimate its power in today’s unmoored West and developing world. The fundamentalist doesn’t guess or argue or wonder or question. He doesn’t have to. He knows.…The distinction that others make in the modern world—that there is a difference between what we know empirically and what we believe normatively—is one the fundamentalist rejects.

  And what the fundamentalist knows is true. It isn’t a proposition, held provisiona
lly, to be tested by further evidence. It isn’t an argument from which he could be dissuaded by something we call reason. It isn’t something that is ever subject to change: what is fundamentally true now, by definition, must be true for all time. For the fundamentalist, there is not a category of things called facts and a separate category called values. The values of the fundamentalist are facts….

  The president himself has explained that the certainty his faith brings liberates him from doubt and anxiety about the courses of action he pursues. He declared in his 1999 book, A Charge to Keep: “My faith frees me…. Frees me to make decisions others might not like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it will not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.”

  The solace from such certitude is surely of great value to an individual at the spiritual level. As the president himself put it, it frees him to make even the most daunting and (literally) earth-shattering decisions without having to worry about public reaction, worry about whether the decision was the right one, or “worry about what comes next.” Serenity flows and anxiety is eliminated by the conviction that one has found absolute truth.

  But when pragmatic concerns are excluded from political and strategic deliberations, then, by definition, decisions become immune from re-examination in light of failed results. Such a mind-set is dangerous in elected officials as such, and especially so when the policy in question is the most monumental of all: war. As Garry Wills wrote in the November 2006 edition of New York Review of Books with regard to the evangelical Christians who continue to rank among the president’s most loyal supporters: