George W. Bush's Medieval Presidency
By Neal Gabler, Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman
Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is author of "Life the Movie:
How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — It should have been an
embarrassing admission for him and a flabbergasting
one for us: President Bush told Fox News recently that
he only "glanced" at newspaper headlines, rarely
reading stories, and that for his real news hits, he relied
on briefings from acolytes who, he said flippantly,
"probably read the news themselves." He rationalized
his indifference by claiming he needed "objective"
information. Even allowing for the president's contempt
for the press, it was a peculiar comment, and it
prompted the New York Times to call him "one of the
most incurious men ever to occupy the White House."
But in citing this as a personal deficiency or even as
political grandstanding, critics may have missed the
larger point. Incuriosity seems characteristic of the
entire Bush administration. More, it seems central to its
very operation. The administration seems indifferent to
data, impervious to competing viewpoints and ideas.
Policy is not adjusted to facts; facts are adjusted to policy. The result is what may
be the nation's first medieval presidency — one in which reality is ignored for the
administration's own prevailing vision. And just as in medieval days, this willful
ignorance can lead to terrible consequences.
At least since the Progressive era, America has been an empire of empiricism, a
nation not only of laws but of facts. As heirs of the Enlightenment, the
Progressives had an abiding faith in the power of rationality and a belief in the
science of governing. Elect officeholders of good intent, arm them with sufficient
information and they could guide the government for the public weal. From this
seed sprang hundreds of government agencies dedicated to churning out data:
statistics on labor, health, education, economics, the environment, you name it.
These were digested by bureaucrats and policymakers, then spun into laws and
regulations. When the data changed, so presumably would policy. Government
went where the facts led it.
Conservatives have often denounced statistics-addicted bureaucrats as social
engineers, but they have been no less reliant on data than liberals, because they
were no less convinced that government could be rationally conducted. They
simply disagreed with liberals on where rationality would take us. President
Reagan might dispute economic statistics, and he certainly reinterpreted them to
demonstrate how his tax cuts would lead to growth and a balanced budget, as
counterintuitive as that seemed. Still, he didn't dispense with facts. He marshaled
them to his cause to illustrate that he saw reality more clearly than his antagonists.
The difference between the current administration and its conservative forebears
is that facts don't seem to matter at all. They don't even matter enough to
reinterpret. Bush doesn't read the papers or watch the news, and Condoleezza
Rice, his national security advisor, reportedly didn't read the National Intelligence
Estimate, which is apparently why she missed the remarks casting doubt on
claims that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa. (She reportedly read
the document later.) And although Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hasn't
disavowed reading or watching the news, he has publicly and proudly disavowed
paying any attention to it. In this administration, everyone already knows the truth.
A more sinister aspect to this presidency's cavalier attitude toward facts is its
effort to bend, twist and distort them when it apparently serves the
administration's interests. Intelligence was exaggerated to justify the war in Iraq.
Even if there were no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or of ties
between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the CIA was expected to substantiate
the accusations. In a similar vein, the New Republic reported that Treasury
Department economists had been demoted for providing objective analysis that
would help define policy, as they had done in previous administrations. Now they
provide fodder for policy already determined. Said one economist who had
worked in the Clinton, Reagan and first Bush administrations, "They didn't worry
about whether they agreed; we were encouraged to raise issues." Not anymore.
Even the scientific community has been waved off by the medievalists. A minority
staff report issued last month by the House Government Reform Committee
investigating scientific research found 21 areas in which the administration had
"manipulated the scientific process and distorted or suppressed scientific findings,"
including the president's assurance that there were more than 60 lines for
stem-cell research when there were actually only 11; it concluded that "these
actions go far beyond the typical shifts in policy that occur with a change in the
political party occupying the White House." When a draft report of the
Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year included data on global
warming, the White House ordered them expunged. Another EPA report, on air
quality at ground zero in Manhattan, was altered to provide false reassurance that
no danger existed, even though it did.
Every administration spins the facts to its advantage. As the old adage goes,
"Figures don't lie but liars do figure." But the White House medievalists aren't just
shading the facts. In actively denying or changing them, they are changing the
basis on which government has traditionally been conducted: rationality. There is
no respect for facts because there is no respect for empiricism. Instead, the Bush
ideologues came to power smug in the security of their own worldview, part of
which, frankly, seems to be the belief that it would be soft and unmanly to let facts
alter their preconceptions. Like the church confronting Galileo, they aren't about
to let reality destroy their cosmology, whether it is a bankrupt plan for pacifying
an Iraq that was supposed to welcome us as liberators or a bankrupt fiscal plan
that was supposed to jolt the economy to health.
Bush has made a great show of his religious faith, and he has won plaudits from
many for reintroducing the concept of evil into political discourse. But his
stubborn insistence on following his own course, especially after Sept. 11, 2001,
may be the most profound way in which religion has shaped his presidency. Bush
has a religious epistemology. Having devalued the idea of an observable,
verifiable reality and having eschewed rational empiricism, he relies on his
unalterable faith in himself not just to inform his policies, as all presidents have, but
to dictate them.
His self-confidence is certainly admirable at a time when most politicians mistake
opinion polls for empiricism. It is also scary. As writer Leon Wieseltier recently
observed, this is a presidency without doubt, one entirely comfortable with its
own certainties, which is what makes it medieval. But as Wieseltier also
observed, it is doubt that deepens one's vision of life and often provides a better
basis for acting within it. It is doubt that helps one understand the world and
enables one to avoid hubris. A presidency without doubt and resistant to
disconcerting facts is a presidency not on the road to Damascus but on the road
to disaster. By regarding facts as political tools, it compromises information and
makes reality itself suspect, not to mention that it compromises the agencies that
provide the information and makes them unreliable in the future. And by ignoring
anything that contradicts its faith, it can vaingloriously plow ahead — right into the
abyss. The president and his crew may well live within a pre-Enlightenment lead
bubble where they are unwilling and unable to see beyond themselves, but their
fellow Americans must live in the real world where even the most powerful nation
cannot simply posit its own reality. If you need proof, just read the newspapers.
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