The President is no Visionary.

One thing I can't figure out is why President Bush is seen as a visionary. He claims that we need to go to Mars and go back to the moon; his supporters claim him to be the next John Kennedy. He invades Iraq and his allies claim he is Reaganesque....confronting Islam like Reagan confronted the Soviet Union. But the President is not a visionary, he is really using strategies and ideas from 100 years ago, dusting them off, and re-presenting them to the American people.

A preface...President Clinton was no FDR democrat. The last New Deal democrat was Jimmy Carter. Clinton was, at best, a progressive in the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt. Clinton pushed through free trade agreements and pursued moderate welfare reform but never staunchly defended the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Theodore Roosevelt, similarly, was a progressive reformer, but not always very liberal. TR was responding to the excess of the so-called Gilded Age and laissez-faire capitalism of the William McKinley presidency. McKinley was an imperialist, a capitalist, and in the back pocket of big business. Things had gotten so out of hand at the time of McKinley's assassination in 1901 that Roosevelt was able to bring many moderate reforms....reforms that mirror the Clinton administration closer than Teddy's cousin Franklin's. George Bush is a sort of reincarnation of William McKinley, except instead of the progressive responding to the laissez-faire-ist of the nineteenth century, Bush is responding to the progressivism of Clinton (of course President Bush would love to roll back the New Deal including Social Security too). Bush is rolling back union labor rights and giving big business lucrative business opportunities. He is removing the regulations of a progressive economy and going back to the economy of the 1890s. We are living in a second gilded age and also an age of imperialism.

Take for example what the President said in 2003. President Bush announced that democracy in Iraq and the larger Middle East would be based on the model of democracy in the Philippines. For a concise criticism of the Philippine model of democracy click here. The problem with this is that nobody really knew what the President meant. The Philippines? Yes, the Philippines, which was given its independence by the U.S. in 1946 after it demonstrated that Filipinos had successfully "learned" the practice of democracy. The reason hardly anybody knew what the President was talking about was because we, as a nation, had forgotten the Philippines and the Philippine/American War 1899-1913. I hope you knew that the U.S. fought a war in the Philippines against Filipinos who had declared their independence from Spain in 1898 under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. If you don't, don't be too hard on yourself, few people are aware of this. We have forgotten about this because it is America's dirty little secret. Aguinaldo engaged in guerilla war to get the Americans out of the Philippines. The U.S., however, engaged in successful anti-guerilla tactics that eventually defeated these "freedom fighters." For example, the U.S. used a scorched earth policy of burning whole villages, imprisoned civilians in concentration camps, and used torture methods such as "water boarding." Between 250,000 and 1 million Filipinos died due to war, disease, and starvation brought on directly and indirectly by this conflict. Yes, the hostilities quieted around 1913 and the U.S. eventually granted the Philippines independence in 1946. Is this the cost of democracy that President Bush is talking about? Why did the U.S. get involved in the Philippines? To spread democracy/civilization (the white man's burden) and to create a lucrative marketplace for American big business to tap into Asia. The Philippines proved very lucrative....should the U.S. succeed in Iraq (which is increasingly doubtful, unless the U.S. fights a dirty war similar to the Philippines), American businesses stand to gain vast profits in the Middle East as well as continuing to crack the Chinese market.

President Bush and the neo-cons have taken a play out of the McKinley book. McKinley never declared war against the Philippines, he sent in 126,000 troops, he declared that Emilio Aguinaldo (a friend of the U.S. a year earlier) was a "bandit." The parallels between the Philippines and Iraq are striking. In fact, the entire Presidency of George W. Bush has been largely informed by the last great laissez-faire, big-business, imperialist President of the 1890s much more than the conservative President of the 1980s or the Presidency of his own father. President Bush is no visionary in the likes of JFK or Reagan. He is not looking forward, but backward to William McKinley. President Bush's ideas are over 100 years old, obsolete, and anti-republican (as in republicanism, such as Jeffersonian or Jacksonian republicanism). Old ideas applied to new problems are like new wine placed in old wineskins....even Jesus knew this didn't work.