Bush is Better Than Obama, or the Idiotification of America

So a bunch of dead heads are engaging in their most recent ponzi scheme. They are passing a picture around on facebook which asks facebookers to like a photo if they think that Bush the younger, Bush the second, was a better president than Obama. Well, Obama may not be perfect. And historically speaking he will probably not be a particularly significant president, the only true measure of presidential significance. His health care plan is probably his only truly significant accomplishment as I type.

Obama's lack of significant achievements, by the way, is not entirely of his own doing. There is no doubt that the Republicans in Congress have done virtually everything in the power to block anything Obama might want to do and thanks to the filibuster in the Senate and their control of the House of Representatives since 2010, a control of the House made possible, in part, thanks to Republican ability to gerrymander House districts in the states, they have been largely able to do just this. Obama, of course, aided and abetted the Republicans in their just strategy of just say no by trying to be the nonpartisan president.

But compare Obama's accomplishments to Bush's. Bush, he who gave us two dismal wars that will not end well and which were not paid for. Bush, he who gave us a government prescription plan for seniors not paid for and which did nothing to lower prescription costs and which was passed simply for cynical political reasons to try to get more of Florida's seniors to vote for him in 2004. Bush, he who presided over and helped give us the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Bush, he who gave us tax cuts which made all of the above worse.

The moral of this tale: anyone who thinks that Bush is a "better" president than Obama are ideologues and demagogues, have been taking too many drugs (opiates of the masses) and that has had a negative impact on their ability to think rationally and coherently, or they are a bunch of bah bahing dittohead driven by emotion made idiots in the first place. Better to judge both Bush and Obama rationally, on the basis of their accomplishments or lack thereof, in other words. And by that standard Bush will likely be regarded as more significant or important than Obama by posterity, not for his positive accomplishments, but for the negative things he did or the negative things that happened on his watch and over which he did have some control.

I talked about the idoitification of America in the title of this brief blog post but I don't really mean it. I think that stupidity has pretty much been at the same levels it is today since demagoguery and demagogues triumphed and became the dominant force in American society with the rise of mass propaganda and its various bread and circuses arms, advertising, television, and the Web amongst them. And I don't think this idiocy is going to decline in the near future despite the utopian dreams of intellectuals and academics that education will provide a means of intellectual liberation for the masses. Welcome to a world where utopian pipe dreams are dead. Welcome to the dismal brave not so new world of emotionally driven mass idiocy.

The Best Man? Ideology and the Miss President of the United States Pageant

Recently a ballot appeared on one of the Linkedin history discussion sites asking subscribers, historians and those interested in history one presumes, who they thought the "best" American president ever was. In this history version of Miss America and Miss American Congeniality Pageant subscribers are asked to chose whether they thought FDR, Woodrow Wilson, or Abraham Lincoln, or two others, were the "best" president of the United States ever?

There is, of course, a fundamental problem with asking a question about the presidents of the United States in this way. The notion "best" is ideological not empirical. It is grounded in notions of cultural "value", much like ideas of beauty and truth, of notions of good and bad, best and worse, not in notions of theoretical or empirical significance. As such what people value in their choices of who they think the "best" president of the US was tells us as much about the cultural contexts and ideological ways of seeing of those making these choices and what they value ideologically as they do about the person they consider to be the "best" president America ever had.

It is this confusion of value with significance that I think is one of the fundamental problems with so much historical analysis. History, with its aversion to theory and reflexivity, tends to confuse cultural and ideological speculation with empirical analysis and empirical significance. I would argue that judgements about American presidents should be based not on notions of value, of notions of "best" but rather on notions of significance. LBJ, for instance, is, to me, one of the most significant of twentieth century American presidents because of his impact on legislation and the impact of his legislation on America's political, economic, cultural, and environmental landscapes from 1964 to today. Needless to say LBJ isn't even on the Linkedin ballot of who was America's "best" president. Blame it on Vietnam?

So how have those who asked and have answered this question about who is America's "best" president defended this question and their answers to it when pushed to do so? Largely by recourse to fetishisation, festishisation of values and fetishisation of grammar. For the defenders of the history is value faith the term "best" is a valid approach to the analysis of the American presidency because the term, though "subjective", is a "superlative" and as such is an aspect of normative English grammar.

It is, of course, this fetishisation of values and grammars and the ideology inherent in these notions that is one of the problems with this type of "historical analysis". Notions of value, of what is best versus what is worse, of what is beautiful versus what is ugly, vary, as an immense amount of empirical evidence has long shown, across time and space. So unless one can produce a wild child who has never experienced the "joys" of language, a language which is inherently cultural and ideological, and grammar, which, as part of language is cultural and ideological, and who can telepathically "orate" on the universal nature of "best", "truth", "beauty", and "the American way" we have to admit that what we value is, empirically speaking, cultural, intersubjective, and ideological. That so many historians don't recognise this can perhaps be chalked up to the discipline's general aversion to reflexivity and theory and its focus on trees rather than the forest that the trees are a part of. Such aversions and such obsessions, however, do not excuse the tendency of such "historians" to ignore the criticisms aimed at the it is alright to ask value laden questions faith. Believing, like faith in general, never gets us anywhere near the neighbourhood of empirical understanding.