Glenn Greenwald: 'A Tragic Legacy'
Mind Sets
Glenn Greenwald’s ‘A Tragic Legacy’ hits the bookstores today. His thesis is that Bush is caught (and has helped catch us) in a ‘good versus evil’ mind set. Of course, ‘anything goes’ against evil. It has led to an ill considered war in Iraq, a trashing of American values, laws and even the Constitution itself.
I have proposed something similar [see ‘A Pattern of Abuse’, posted to my blog in July of 2004]: a mind set underlying actions taken over three of the last four Republican administrations, playing its way out through Nixon/Watergate, Reagan/Iran-Contra, and Bush/Iraq. It is, in fact, complimentary to Greenwald’s idea, running pretty much congruently with good versus evil Manicheanism. Interestingly, the President is heir to both, the one Greenwald proposes through Bush’s born-again experience, and the one I propose through the Bush family political heritage.
My consciousness of this mind set first emerged as an impression I derived from John Mitchell et al during Watergate. It can be put: We are the people, the salt of the earth; we are the right and proper stewards of this nation; our hearts are pure, our motives are honorable, and what we choose to do is, therefore and apriori right, proper and above reproach.
While the 'good versus evil' framework of thought is shared by Bush's evangelical base, the alternate mind set suggested above is that of a significant part of the moneyed Republican establishment. It goes back well into our history - to the Republican Party of McKinley and the party boss Mark Hanna, who cursed the advent of Theodore Roosevelt (‘that damned cowboy’) into the White House. [It must be regarded as one of history’s great ironies that our present ‘cowboy’ in the White House is very much a man after Mark Hanna’s heart.]
I don’t propose that this particular mind set is so much consciously held, but rather manifests as a kind of sub-conscious presumption of rectitude, dangerously unexamined, and capable of generating a massive conceit of empowerment. It is difficult for me, and I expect some others, to credit Dick Cheney and his Neocon coterie with fundamentalist religious Manicheanism, but I would suggest that the conceit I propose well prepares the ground for the conscious articulations of Neocon hubris. This is all to suggest that we may need to rid ourselves of more than one pernicious mind set.
9:50:33 PM 
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