The two are definitely in the same league, in absolute terms. Maybe Obama is Nixon to Bush’s LBJ, in that he is continuing and expanding upon his predecessor’s foreign and domestic enormities, deserving special ire for ramping them up, but with the president before still deserving special hatred for having started so many horrible policies.
Of course, it is unfair to compare Obama to Bush just yet, since Bush had eight years of destruction and Obama has only had a little over two. Nevertheless, let’s remember what Bush had done by this point in his presidency, mid-March 2003. Just over two years into his presidency, Bush had:
- Invaded and occupied Afghanistan
- Invaded Iraq
- Rounded up and detained hundreds of aliens right after 9/11
- Established a policy of indefinite detention and torture
- Created a prison camp at Guantanamo
- Signed the Patriot Act, including major assaults on free speech (National Security Letters) and a near total annihilation of the Fourth Amendment
- Created the Transportation Security Administration
- Created the Department of Homeland Security
- Instituted “Project Safe Neighborhoods” and overseen a vast increase in firearms prosecutions by the Justice Department
- Signed No Child Left Behind
- Rammed through Medicare Part D, adding $20 trillion in unfunded liabilities, the largest expansion of the welfare state in about 35 years
- Rammed through Sarbanes-Oxley, the largest expansion of the corporate regulatory state perhaps since the New Deal, which has devastated the economy
- Signed protectionist steel tariffs
- Expanded farm subsidies
- Made “free-speech zones” a commonplace
- Directed the NSA (a branch of the military) to warrantlessly wiretap the American people
- Accelerated the subsidization (directly and indirectly) of home ownership by minorities and others who couldn’t really afford houses, sowing the seeds for a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble, culminating in the crash of ’08
Obama has done a staggering amount of damage in just over two years, but I submit that Bush might still have him beat in terms of destruction unleashed in so short a time. Also, the war in Iraq has long-term consequences in foreign relations that are yet to be seen. Bush could very well be the Woodrow Wilson of the 21st century, having set in motion a series of devastating events humanity will suffer from for a century.
Obama is definitely no sort of relief from the Bush years. But never let it be forgotten how completely terrible his predecessor was, right off the bat.
Today is April 19, the anniversary of the FBI’s finishing off the Branch Davidians at Waco and, two years later, the Oklahoma City incident, which Timothy McVeigh called payback for Waco. Every year since 2003 I’ve written on at least one of these events. Today at LRC I have “Waco and the New Brown Scare.” Also see my Waco archives, which includes my undergraduate history thesis from 2003. A good book on Waco is Carol Moore’s the Davidian Massacre, all online. As she points out, it was not until 2007 that the survivors from Waco were finally freed. And all libertarians should watch Waco: Rules of Engagement. The video is online.
As for the Oklahoma City bombing, Lew links to the classic piece by Gore Vidal—one of the few leftists who was not enamored of the left-establishment’s 1990s militia scare or blinded to the Clinton regime’s injustices at Waco and abroad. And see Scott Horton’s interview of Jesse Trentadue, “They Are Lying to You About the Oklahoma City Bombing.”
Many left-anarchists are fairly civilized. But many others are not. An ex-vegan was going to give an anti-vegetarianism speech at an anarchist book fair in San Francisco, and these criminals threw cayenne-laced pies at her. What completely indefensible behavior. These people might want to bring down state power, but I don’t know that we’d be better off being ruled by them than the current power elite.
One reason “anarchism” — the rejection of the state or, more generally, the rejection of authority—is not enough can be seen in the way left-anarchists often violate private property or even commit acts of personal violence against political enemies. Property rights and the non-aggression axiom are key. Anarchism is best seen as the logical consequence of libertarianism, grounded in property and self-ownership, rather than being an end in itself. All radical libertarians should be anarchists. But not all anarchists are truly libertarians.
Of course, even private criminality would be infinitely more tolerable than the state, and certainly this is the case in a relatively civilized culture that can handle some deviants here and there, as ours can. Indeed, the fact that America is relatively civil despite the state doing everything to undermine civil society—through war, drug prohibition, gun control, welfare, public schools, etc.—demonstrates the workability of anarchy. But culture must come first to maintain any free or even civilized society. And on the question of culture, many left-anarchists are on the wrong side. They would reduce us to tribalism, primitivism and chaos. By the way, I am not talking about the mutualists or pro-market, pro-law left-anarchists. I’m not talking about Tuckerites or followers of Proudhon. These people all have views on social order and economics than differ from mine, but at least they believe in society and tend to oppose violence against the innocent. I am talking about the social anarchists even to the “left” of these folks, who have no love of the market, no respect for property at all, no compunctions about watching the world burn.
Perhaps in a sense they are the true “anarchists”—opposed to all order, hierarchy and law, not just statism—whereas the strictly anti-statist meaning of anarchism is the actual misnomer. But on the other hand, how can one be against order and hierarchy altogether? Even to be philosophically opposed to hierarchy puts hierarchy below disorder, thus bolstering a hierarchy of ideas. The extremist anarchists oppose all social conventions and norms, and even language and technology. You can read about it on their websites. This kind of anarchism is incoherent and contradictory, even if it is more true to the etymology of the word “anarchism.” But anarcho-libertarianism, anchored in private property rights and non-aggression, is far more achievable, humane and civilized, and eschews the type of aggression we often see left-anarchists personally involved in.
