Slate’s David Greenberg offers a belated gloss on the Brooks interview with the Warlord.
But perhaps there’s a more charitable way to think of Bush’s understanding of history: as a Hegelian. (Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed, for one, has offered an intriguing Hegelian reading of Bush.) Like Carlyle, who was influenced by his work, Hegel venerated heroes who steer the course of events. After seeing Napoleon ride into battle to defeat the armies of Prussian monarchy at Jena in 1806, Hegel famously described the emperor as “the World Spirit riding on a horse”—a great individual shaping history. But Hegel also believed the battle at Jena to represent, as Francis Fukuyama stressed in his influential 1989 essay, the “end of history.” History, Hegel argued, had an inner logic, a teleology, with the unfolding of liberty as the ultimate plan. For Hegel, Great Men like Napoleon don’t just happen to find themselves as emperor of Europe; they’re driven by an inner spirit that serves the aims of historical destiny.
The Stiftung long argued that Bush-As-Spirit-Of-The-Age is perhaps not entirely comically absurd. Christian Socialist Authoritarianism in the U.S. came from somewhere. True, the Movement’s various strands took advantage of 9/11. And true, they together routed and used the hapless Democrats as props and sock puppets until 2006. But the extent of the regime’s transformation of American social fabric, mores, politics and destiny was not wholly imposed top down. The Joe Kleins of the world didn’t and still don’t get it.
The Enlightenment was always a thin veneer in America before 2001. It’s thinner still in 2007.
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