I’ve always been under the impression that America is a land of pragmatists, can-do people who look at a problem up and down until they find a solution based on the facts and an analysis of those facts.
We created the most dynamic economy on the face of the planet, we put a man on the moon, we saved Europe from fascism.
And isn’t that supposed to be the creed often wielded to great effect against soft-headed liberals with their pie-in-the-sky ideals? While liberals dream of world peace and ending poverty, conservatives talk about practical politics and getting things done. They’re fiscally conservative, free-traders, and above all, they believe in the capacity of the individual to solve his or her own problems without the intervention of Big Brother.
Well, it would appear that I’m living in the past. In the Bush regime, they have a new term for those of us who still cling to empirical evidence when making judgments about the world we live in. We are part of that passé group known collectively as “the reality based community.” So says an aide to Bush, who reportedly went on to describe a new vision for America: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Welcome to the empire, a place where power is its own justification.
I must confess that this little Nietzschean morsel frightens me more than anything I’ve read about the administration since the campaign season began.
If we take this aide at his word, this administration feels that all its actions are by definition justified. No explanations are required, either for the exercise of state power or for the consequences that ensue as a result. And above all, no accounting to the facts. Everything is reduced to the simple tautology that power is its own reason for being.
The New York Times Magazine article from which the quote is taken links this idea back to Bush’s faith; that is, to his religiously inspired belief in his righteousness, empirical reality be damned. But in the statement above power doesn’t even require a religious justification. It just is.
What is perhaps most astonishing about this vision of America, however, is its profoundly anti-democratic nature. While Bush goes around the country pounding podiums in defense of freedom, one is left with this vision of his apparatchiks plotting the empire’s next move, insulated from any sense of accountability to either the American people or--and this is perhaps the most disturbing part--the facts themselves.
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