Josh Marshall: The Post-Modern President

Josh Marshall writes in the September issue of Washington Monthly:

“Almost all of Bush’s deceptions have been deployed when he has tried to pass off his preexisting agenda items as solutions to particular problems with which, for the most part, they have no real connection. That’s when the unverifiable assertion comes in handy. Many of the administration’s policy arguments have amounted to predictions–tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower–that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn’t be definitely disproven until events played out in the future. In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration’s main obstacle has been the experts themselves–the economists who didn’t trust the budget projections, the generals who didn’t buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts–a task that comes particularly easy to the revisionists who drive Bush administration policy. They tend to see experts as guardians of the status quo, who seek to block any and all change, no matter how necessary, and whose views are influenced and corrupted by the agendas and mindsets of their agencies. … For them, ignoring the experts and their ‘facts’ is not only necessary to advance their agenda, but a virtuous effort in the service of a higher cause. …

“Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn’t just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. … That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because ‘the facts’ aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don’t agree with you, they’re just the other side’s argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that’s all the facts are, it’s really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.”