THEY SHOULD HATE HIM:

Bush's Greatness: There's a good reason he infuriates the reactionary left. (David Gelernter, 09/13/2004, Weekly Standard)

IT'S OBVIOUS not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it "lunacy." But that's too easy. The "special quality" of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that.

Bush's greatness is often misunderstood. He is great not because he showed America how to react to 9/11 but because he showed us how to deal with a still bigger event--the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left us facing two related problems, one moral and one practical. Neither President Clinton nor the first Bush found solutions--but it's not surprising that the right answers took time to discover, and an event like 9/11 to bring them into focus.

In moral terms: If you are the biggest boy on the playground and there are no adults around, the playground is your responsibility. It is your duty to prevent outrages--because your moral code demands that outrages be prevented, and (for now) you are the only one who can prevent them. [...]

The Iraq war started as a fight to knock out a regime that invaded its neighbors, murdered its domestic enemies with poison gas, subsidized terrorism, and flouted the international community. Obviously such a regime was dangerous to American interests. But as the war continued and we confronted Saddam's gruesome tyranny face to face, the moral issue grew more important, as emancipation did in the Civil War. For years the Iraqi people had been screaming, in effect: "Oh, my God. Please help me! Please help me! I'm dying!" How could America have answered, "We don't want to get involved"? We are the biggest kid on the playground. If we won't help, who will?

I have just quoted the death-cries of Kitty Genovese, who died on the streets of New York 40 years ago. And I have quoted the response of an onlooker who didn't feel like helping. Her case still resonates in America's conscience, and tells us more than we want to know about the president's enemies. [...]

Reactionaries recoil from new ideas and try to suppress and defeat them. They want things to stay the same. Hence their racist hatred of uppity white conservatives, who have developed the cheek to threaten the left's cultural power. Such institutions as Fox News and the conservative Washington think tanks are hugely disturbing to reactionary liberals. The president faces the same thinking as he tries to set policy for post-Cold War America. Reactionary liberals want everything to stay just the same. All trends must continue just as they have been. (Judges must continue to subvert democracy; Congress must continue to create new entitlements.) We must treat the new totalitarians just the same as we once were forced to treat the Soviets--gingerly. Our goal must be not to liberate their victims, not to defeat and disarm their military machines, but to arrange détente with their dictators--just as we once did. (Détente with Saddam was French and Russian policy until we screwed things up.) Our antiquated pre-cell phone, pre-microchip laws and regulations must stay just the same (kill the Patriot Act!), and we must sit still and wait politely for the next terrorist outrage, just as we always have.

Bush has a simple message for the reactionary left: The times change and we change with them. He is a progressive conservative--and a progressive president in the best sense. And he has established his greatness in record time.

What he's done at home is just as revolutionary and they've been just as reactionary, but neocons prefer to focus on the foreign affairs stuff.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 6, 2004 11:22 PM