[Peace-discuss] Framing the debate; it's not a question of incompetence…

[Morton K. Brussel]

A rather astute article by Lakoff et al, although giving undue  
credence to conservatives' belief in democracy and freedom and under- 
emphasizing the role of "big money-business-corporations"(i.e.,  
greed) in the "conservative" world view espoused by this  
administration. --mkb

Published on Monday, June 26, 2006 by the Rockridge Institute
Bush Is Not Incompetent
by George Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger, and Sam Ferguson

Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s  
plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to  
Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as  
incompetent. For example, Nancy Pelosi said “The situation in Iraq  
and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one  
issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader." Self- 
satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point.  
Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are  
not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of  
execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of  
his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself,  
carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be  
running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy  
is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on  
all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off  
the same cliff.

To Bush’s base, his bumbling folksiness is part of his charm — it  
fosters conservative populism. Bush plays up this image by proudly  
stating his lack of interest in reading and current events, his  
fondness for naps and vacations and his self-deprecating jokes. This  
image causes the opposition to underestimate his capacities —  
disregarding him as a complete idiot — and deflects criticism of his  
conservative allies. If incompetence is the problem, it’s all about  
Bush. But, if conservatism is the problem, it is about a set of  
ideas, a movement and its many adherents.

The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the  
following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush  
administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:

Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented  
degree
Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence  
and in a manner with which the military disagreed
Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the  
lower federal courts with many more
Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the  
No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill  
and a number of massive tax cuts
Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory  
protections
Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment —  
“The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” — to  
deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
Winning re-election and solidifying his party’s grip on Congress
These aren’t signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the  
Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing  
its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving  
its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.

It’s not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it’s the conservative  
agenda.

The Conservative Agenda

Conservative philosophy has three fundamental tenets: individual  
initiative, that is, government’s positive role in people’s lives  
outside of the military and police should be minimized; the President  
is the moral authority; and free markets are enough to foster freedom  
and opportunity.

The conservative vision for government is to shrink it – to “starve  
the beast” in Conservative Grover Norquist’s words. The conservative  
tagline for this rationale is that “you can spend your money better  
than the government can.” Social programs are considered unnecessary  
or “discretionary” since the primary role of government is to defend  
the country’s border and police its interior. Stewardship of the  
commons, such as allocation of healthcare or energy policy, is left  
to people’s own initiative within the free market. Where profits  
cannot be made — conservation, healthcare for the poor — charity is  
meant to replace justice and the government should not be involved.

Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government  
wasn’t there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the  
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places  
emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the  
government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show  
guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted  
the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they  
thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the  
people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions,  
their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn’t  
have failed if he bore no responsibility.

The response to Hurricane Katrina — rather, the lack of response —  
was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the  
government can have no positive role in its citizen’s lives. This  
response was not about Bush’s incompetence, it was a conservative,  
shrink-government response to a natural disaster.

Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was  
its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane  
warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the  
conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming,  
not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global  
warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing  
global warming would call for environmental regulation and  
governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation  
is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives’  
golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes — based on  
recognizing global warming — were not heeded. Conservative free  
market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.

Our budget deficit is not the result of incompetent fiscal  
management. It too is an outgrowth of conservative philosophy. What  
better way than massive deficits to rid social programs of their  
funding?

In Iraq, we also see the impact of philosophy as much as a failure of  
execution.

The idea for the war itself was born out of deep conservative  
convictions about the nature and capacity of US military force. Among  
the Project for a New American Century’s statement of principles  
(signed in 1997 by a who’s who of the architects of the Iraq war —  
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, I.  
Lewis Libby among others) are four critical points:

we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry  
out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces  
for the future
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge  
regimes hostile to our interests and values
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad
we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in  
preserving and extending an international order friendly to our  
security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Implicit in these ideas is that the United States military can spread  
democracy through the barrel of a gun. Our military might and power  
can be a force for good.

It also indicates that the real motive behind the Iraq war wasn’t to  
stop Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but was a test of  
neoconservative theory that the US military could reshape Middle East  
geo-politics. The manipulation and disregard of intelligence to sell  
the war was not incompetence, it was the product of a conservative  
agenda.

Unfortunately, this theory exalts a hubristic vision over the lessons  
of history. It neglects the realization that there is a limit to a  
foreign army’s ability to shape foreign politics for the good. Our  
military involvement in Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, Cuba  
(prior to Castro) and Panama, or European imperialist endeavors  
around the globe should have taught us this lesson. Democracy needs  
to be an organic, homegrown movement, as it was in this country. If  
we believe so deeply in our ideals, they will speak for themselves  
and inspire others.

During the debate over Iraq, the conservative belief in the  
unquestioned authority and moral leadership of the President helped  
shape public support. We see this deference to the President  
constantly: when Conservatives call those questioning the President’s  
military decisions “unpatriotic”; when Conservatives defend the  
executive branch’s use of domestic spying in the war on terror; when  
Bush simply refers to himself as the “decider.” “I support our  
President” was a common justification of assent to the Iraq policy.

Additionally, as the implementer of the neoconservative vision and an  
unquestioned moral authority, our President felt he had no burden to  
forge international consensus or listen to the critiques of our  
allies. “You’re with us, or you’re against us,” he proclaimed after  
9/11.

Much criticism continues to be launched against this administration  
for ineptitude in its reconstruction efforts. Tragically, it is here  
too that the administration’s actions have been shaped less by  
ineptitude than by deeply held conservative convictions about the  
role of government.

As noted above, Conservatives believe that government’s role is  
limited to security and maintaining a free market. Given this  
conviction, it’s no accident that administration policies have  
focused almost exclusively on the training of Iraqi police, and US  
access to the newly free Iraqi market — the invisible hand of the  
market will take care of the rest. Indeed, George Packer has recently  
reported that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is nearing its end  
(“The Lessons of Tal Affar,” The New Yorker, April 10th, 2006).  
Iraqis must find ways to rebuild themselves, and the free market we  
have constructed for them is supposed to do this. This is not  
ineptitude. This is the result of deep convictions over the nature of  
freedom and the responsibilities of governments to their people.

Finally, many of the miscalculations are the result of a conservative  
analytic focus on narrow causes and effects, rather than mere  
incompetence. Evidence for this focus can be seen in conservative  
domestic policies: Crime policy is based on punishing the criminals,  
independent of any effort to remedy the larger social issues that  
cause crime; immigration policy focuses on border issues and the  
immigrants, and ignores the effects of international and domestic  
economic policy on population migration; environmental policy is  
based on what profits there are to be gained or lost today, without  
attention paid to what the immeasurable long-term costs will be to  
the shared resource of our environment; education policy, in the form  
of vouchers, ignores the devastating effects that dismantling the  
public school system will have on our whole society.

Is it any surprise that the systemic impacts of the Iraq invasion  
were not part of the conservative moral or strategic calculus used in  
pursuing the war?

The conservative war rhetoric focused narrowly on ousting Saddam — he  
was an evil dictator, and evil cannot be tolerated, period. The moral  
implications of unleashing social chaos and collateral damage in  
addition to the lessons of history were not relevant concerns.

As a consequence, we expected to be greeted as liberators. The  
conservative plan failed to appreciate the complexities of the  
situation that would have called for broader contingency planning. It  
lacked an analysis of what else would happen in Iraq and the Middle  
East as a result of ousting the Hussein Government, such as an  
Iranian push to obtain nuclear weapons.

Joe Biden recently said, “if I had known the president was going to  
be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him  
the authority [to go to war].” Had Bush actually been incompetent, he  
would have never been able to lead us to war in Iraq. Had Bush been  
incompetent, he would not have been able to ram through hundreds of  
billions of dollars in tax cuts. Had Bush been incompetent, he would  
have been blocked from stacking the courts with right-wing judges.  
Incompetence, on reflection, might have actually been better for the  
country.

Hidden Successes

Perhaps the biggest irony of the Bush-is-incompetent frame is that  
these “failures” — Iraq, Katrina and the budget deficit — have been  
successes in terms of advancing the conservative agenda.

One of the goals of Conservatives is to keep people from relying on  
the federal government. Under Bush, FEMA was reorganized to no longer  
be a first responder in major natural disasters, but to provide  
support for local agencies. This led to the disastrous response to  
Hurricane Katrina. Now citizens, as well as local and state  
governments, have become distrustful of the federal government’s  
capacity to help ordinary citizens. Though Bush’s popularity may have  
suffered, enhancing the perception of federal government as inept  
turned out to be a conservative victory.

Conservatives also strive to get rid of protective agencies and  
social programs. The deficit Bush created through irresponsible tax  
cuts and a costly war in Iraq will require drastic budget cuts to  
remedy. Those cuts, conservatives know, won’t come from military  
spending, particularly when they raise the constant specter of war.  
Instead, the cuts will be from what Conservatives have begun to call  
“non-military, discretionary spending;” that is, the programs that  
contribute to the common good like the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEMA, OSHA and  
the NLRB. Yet another success for the conservative agenda.

Both Iraq and Katrina have enriched the coffers of the conservative  
corporate elite, thus further advancing the conservative agenda.  
Halliburton, Lockhead Martin and US oil companies have enjoyed huge  
profit margins in the last six years. Taking Iraq’s oil production  
off-line in the face of rising international demand meant prices  
would rise, making the oil inventories of Exxon and other firms that  
much more valuable, leading to record profits. The destruction  
wrought by Katrina and Iraq meant billions in reconstruction  
contracts. The war in Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan) meant  
billions in military equipment contracts. Was there any doubt where  
those contracts would go? Chalk up another success for Bush’s  
conservative agenda.

Bush also used Katrina as an opportunity to suspend the environmental  
and labor protection laws that Conservatives despise so much. In the  
wake of Katrina, environmental standards for oil refineries were  
temporarily suspended to increase production. Labor laws are being  
thwarted to drive down the cost of reconstruction efforts. So, amidst  
these “disasters,” Conservatives win again.

Where most Americans see failure in Iraq – George Miller recently  
called Iraq a “blunder of historic proportions” – conservative  
militarists are seeing many successes. Conservatives stress the  
importance of our military — our national pride and worth is  
expressed through its power and influence. Permanent bases are being  
constructed as planned in Iraq, and America has shown the rest of the  
world that we can and will preemptively strike with little  
provocation. They succeeded in a mobilization of our military forces  
based on ideological pretenses to impact foreign policy. The war has  
struck fear in other nations with a hostile show of American power.  
The conservatives have succeeded in strengthening what they perceive  
to be the locus of the national interest —military power.

It’s NOT Incompetence

When Progressives shout “Incompetence!” it obscures the many  
conservative successes. The incompetence frame drastically misses the  
point, that the conservative vision is doing great harm to this  
country and the world. An understanding of this and an articulate  
progressive response is needed. Progressives know that government can  
and should have a positive role in our lives beyond simple, physical  
security. It had a positive impact during the progressive era,  
busting trusts, and establishing basic labor standards. It had a  
positive impact during the new deal, softening the blow of the  
depression by creating jobs and stimulating the economy. It had a  
positive role in advancing the civil rights movement, extending  
rights to previously disenfranchised groups. And the United States  
can have a positive role in world affairs without the use of its  
military and expressions of raw power. Progressives acknowledge that  
we are all in this together, with “we” meaning all people, across all  
spectrums of race, class, religion, sex, sexual preference and age.  
“We” also means across party lines, state lines and international  
borders.

The mantra of incompetence has been an unfortunate one. The  
incompetence frame assumes that there was a sound plan, and that the  
trouble has been in the execution. It turns public debate into a  
referendum on Bush’s management capabilities, and deflects a critique  
of the impact of his guiding philosophy. It also leaves open the  
possibility that voters will opt for another radically conservative  
president in 2008, so long as he or she can manage better. Bush will  
not be running again, so thinking, talking and joking about him being  
incompetent offers no lessons to draw from his presidency.

Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush’s conservative philosophy  
is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of  
conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.

Conservatism itself is the villain that is harming our people,  
destroying our environment, and weakening our nation. Conservatives  
are undermining American values through legislation almost every day.  
This message applies to every conservative bill proposed to Congress.  
The issue that arises every day is which philosophy of governing  
should shape our country. It is the issue of our times. Unless  
conservative philosophy itself is discredited, Conservatives will  
continue their domination of public discourse, and with it, will  
continue their domination of politics.

© 2006 The Rockridge Institute
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