Harold Bloom Writes on Bush

Thanks to Juan Cole of Informed Comment, I read Harold Bloom's long pessimistic assessment of American democracy and the possibility of holding Bush accountable:

Reflections in the Evening Land

Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian


Huey Long, known as "the Kingfish," dominated the state of Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42. Simultaneously governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish uttered a prophecy that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years after his violent end: "Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!"

I reflected on Huey Long (always mediated for me by his portrait as Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men) recently, when I listened to President George W Bush addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was thus benefited by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV channel, which is the voice of Bushian crusading democracy, very much of the Kingfish's variety. Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy.

Bloom goes on to express his doubts that the Democrats can come back and he makes several insightful comments connecting American literature with the current national gestalt. But there are signs that Bloom's pessimism is misplaced. The fact that we are aware of so many of the abuses of the Bush Administration indicates that Bush still does not have quite the control necessary for his ambitions nor the control to overcome the incompetence so obvious to the public. Years ago, I remember a couple of my college professors saying similar things about Nixon and the coming doom of the republic but we managed to muddle through. And yet, I admit I'm sobered by the thought that my professors were half-right: the Democrats never fully recovered from Nixon and his southern strategy. Of course, Bush, Karl Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld learned a lot from Nixon's mistakes but in the last two years I've seen signs that the Democrats have been learning from their earlier mistakes. Air America and the facts marshalled by liberal blogs in the face of fictions and incompetent assessments by right wing Republicans is a sign that finally, at long last, the Democrats, moderates, liberals, rational independents, and even a few honest Republicans can push back against the onslaught of the Republican noise machine.

Bloom suggests that Bush has destroyed democracy as a useful word. When Bush speaks of democracy and the Republican Party pays consultants to jam Democratic phone lines and then pays their legal expenses, their definition of democracy takes on an odd meaning. In Iraq, it has been hard since day one to believe that what Bush meant by democracy was anything other than privatization, capitalism and politicians easily bribed by sweetheart deals and plenty of soft campaign money. The initial effort to install Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad was something of a giveaway. Now there really were some efforts to bring democracy to Iraq but those efforts always seemed afterthoughts, particularly when the blunders seemed to pile up and democracy seemed a way to change the subject.

But, corny though it sounds, democracy is not so much a word but an idea. Ideas that are useful have a resilience, they are stubborn, they come back after a storm and they take root again. Democracy is not perfect but there is such a thing as minimal standards of law and custom. Bush does not represent our way and there are Democrats, independents and Republicans that agree with that assessment. The noise we're hearing are bullies that don't like the light shining on their activities and frauds.