Not Crazy, Just Chaotic Posted by Michael Signer

Very quickly -- as my billables are calling -- I also don't find either of the two hypotheses Suzanne discusses about the Administration's foreign policy compelling (is that slalom metaphor great, or what?)  To assume either that all the Administration officials are marionettes dangling under Rove's nimble fingers, or that the Administration is "schizophrenic," misses the underlying dynamic.

I have never believed in the Omnipotent Rove myth -- his politics are too heavy-handed, too broad-stroke and clumsy for that (Bush's popularity is too low, his victories too narrow, to convince me that Karl is a Svengali).  Instead, David Brooks' recent New York Times column "A House Divided, Strong", was more accurate:

Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with.

So, instead of thinking of the Administration governed by Rove-as-Magician or Bush-as-Crazy-Man, imagine instead a loose, federalist republic riven with internal division between competing, rational states.  You have the Visionary State, filled with neocons like Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle, who tend not to care about short-term political success, convinced as they are in the divine righteousness of their mission.  Then you have the Muscular State, dominated by realpolitikers like Condi, Rumsfeld, and Bolton, who want American might and ballsy exertions of it.  Finally, you have, well, Sweden, led by neo-Clintonian constructivists like Powell and -- well, who else? 

Like any loose federalist republic -- think Iraq right now, or pre-Civil War America, or pre-Bismarck Germany -- these factions fight, hard and rationally, to win discrete battles, and they each do win, from time to time.  The weak central government tries to arbitrate by handing out its support, and victories, serially.  Everyone wins from time to time -- but nobody wins permanently.  And so the Bush Administration -- weak, weird state that it is, staggers from one pattern to the next.

This is what happens when you have an intellectually unmoored President susceptible to faddish thinking, and very powerful inner advisors primarily interested in politics, rather than ideas.

It's chaotic, true -- but it isn't crazy.

Comments

[Thomas Smyth]

The GOP also remains so powerful while being "chaotic" because it becomes cohesive in a hurry when faced with a common enemy- e.g. Clinton, or especially Kerry.

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