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By Nicolas Lemann
George W. Bush, the least visual of our five living former presidents, traveled to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the crash site of United Flight 93, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and gave a report that Bush brought in compared to the al-Qaeda attackers at the time with the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. Both, he said, are “children of the same unclean spirit,” whom we have called Donald Trump either, but it wasn’t a mystery he had in his head when he said, “Much of our politics has become a simple call to anger, fear and resentment. we are concerned about our country and our long road together. “
It has been transparent that Bush hates Trump. No it’s just that Trump has directed his typical verbal tyrannical cruelties against the Bush family, it’s also that he’s made it clear that Bush’s ancestral party understands what Bush, in Shanksville, called “an evil force. “Either the political cause to which Bush faithful his life became bitter, or he still had illusions about the nature of the Party he led. It doesn’t have to be pleasant to behold.
Bush spoke in Pennsylvania about the spirit of national unity that prevailed after Sept. 11, but it was a natural transitory reaction to the country’s attack. Trumpism didn’t come out of nowhere. Anti-immigrant, religiously intolerant, conspiratorial, and racist elements have long been provided in American politics, and since the tillout of the Southern Democratic Party, they have discovered their main home in the Republican Party. that of the Party: from the northeast to the southwest, from the Protestant superior to the newborn, from the liberal internationalist to the bellicose.
Even before September 11, there was a war for Bush’s soul. He spent the weeks leading up to the attacks publicly wondering if he would allow mobile studies of embryonic offspring funded by the federal government before landing on a clumsy compromise that was a sign of his popularity from the strength of In Foreign Policy, those who think Bush’s father deserved to have overthrown Saddam Hussein in 1991. at the end of the first Gulf War, they dreamed of attacking it again. The multilateralists competed with the crowd of a superforce. The attacks resolved those arguments, all in one sense: the Bush administration has moved to the dark side, in Dick Cheney’s unforgettable expression, about detention, torture and civil liberties; legalized new surveillance systems at home and abroad; it has alienated many of them. and, more importantly, he to conquer and occupy Afghanistan first, then Iraq.
The attacks brought out Bush’s competitive instincts, but he must have believed that each and every move would work. Just nine days after the attacks, in a speech in which he uttered the word “war on terror,” he began to make his case. A wonderful global war between the intelligent and the wicked had begun; Other people everywhere, especially in the Arab Middle East, aspired to live in an American-style capitalist democracy and hoped the United States would take them there. Osama bin Laden’s murderous fanaticism represented the only genuine option for the American path. Shanksville, Bush showed that he still thinks of those piously Manichean terms: he referred to “the audacity of evil. “His pride in his overall clarity and determination, now evident, paved the way for massive mistakes that had lasting consequences.
The U. S. chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq and, at the end of the Bush presidency, the currency crisis and the onset of the Great Recession, actually dominated the distrust that already existed in leaders and institutions and led to a wave of scapegoats. (elites) and weak (immigrants). Both primary parties produced unforeseen superstars, Bernie Sanders, for democrats, and Trump, for Republicans, but the populist triumph was most complete in Bush’s party, where other people like him and his successor as president Candidate Mitt Romney are now outsiders, while Barack Obama and Joe Biden remain top figures for Democrats.
Bush’s lamentations about Trumpism are poignant; It doesn’t just pretend to place him as repulsive. The lesson here, however, is not what Bush turns out to think it is. Political leadership is about making smart, tangible effects that make a difference in people’s lives, not about delivering a message of unity. Respect and honor (even if that’s smart too). It is not helpful to perceive global affairs in the broadest terms imaginable, as a struggle between the intelligent and the wicked. Other tactics that require very different responses. What would help us as much as possible to lead us to a post-Trump global situation would be to have a government that does not ostensibly fail in its most important tasks. Hopefully, Biden’s leadership can make up for that. Bush’s leadership did not.
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