# Posted 8:52 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WE HATE WHAT WE CANNOT FEAR: A few weeks back, there was a lot of talk about Jonathan Chait's TNR essay entitled "Why I hate George W. Bush". Since I still haven't gotten around to subscribing to TNR Online, I didn't read Chait's essay until TNR sent it out (for free) to all those on its weekly update e-mail list.

Unsurprisingly, reaction to Chait's essay has been divided along partisan lines. Conservatives such as David Brooks tend to see it as evidence that even mainstream liberals have gone overboard with their resentment of the President. Liberals, of course, beg to differ, although some think that Chait's article played right into the hands of conservatives who want to paint all liberals as wild-eyed radicals.

From where I stand, however, the real problem with Chait's essay is its total lack of historical context. And I don't mean that Chait should spend more time writing about Andrew Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant. What's wrong from a historical perspective is Chait's absurd premise that liberals hate George Bush more than they hated Ronald Reagan.

While my memories of the Reagan are somewhat less than reliable, the overwhelming sense I get from my academic reading is that Reagan was a far more controversial figure than any of his successors. But perhaps more important than the hatred that Democrats felt for Ronald Reagan was their abject fear of him. Whereas Bush's upper-crust upbringing and foot-in-mouth pronouncements make him seem vulnerable, Reagan's All-American upbringing and flawless public persona struck terror into the hearts of all those Democrats who believed that no argument they made, no matter how sound, could prevent The Great Communicator from persuading the American public of just how right he was.

Thus, Chait is essentially right to begin his article by focusing on Bush's character. According to Chait,

[Bush] reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Where Chait goes wrong is with assertion that Bush-hatred reflects substantive political opposition on the grounds that Bush is not just more ideological than Clinton, but also far more ideological than Reagan. In fact, Chait incomprehensibly describes Bush as "the most partisan president in modern U.S. history."

While arguing that Bush wants to dismantle the welfare state by privatizing Medicare and Social Security, Chait fails to note that Reagan talked of destroying both programs without offering much in the way of an alternative. And while Chait is correct that Reagan followed his massive tax cut with some concessions to his critics, he only did so because the economy went into a tailspin just after the tax cuts went into effect. Moreover, Reagan tried to fight off any protests against his tax cuts, but found it impossible to overcome the objections of both a Democratic House and a moderate Republican Senate. Thus, if Bush can sometimes afford to be more partisan, it is because he has what Reagan never did: solid support on the Hill.

Now what about foreign policy? Given their support of the war against Iraq and relative silence even after no WMD were found, it is hard to characterize Bush as all that much of a radical on this front. In contrast, Reagan drove his opponents up the wall with his constant antagonization of the Soviet Union and inexplicable obsession with fighting Communism in Central America. And then came Iran-Contra. Finally, the President's sterling reputation became tarnished. And yet he was able to emerge from the crisis without taking any personal responsibility for his subordinates' flagrant subversion of the constitutional order. So if you thought the Florida recount made Democrats mad...

Yet despite all their anger and resentment, Democrats often held back thanks to their fear of the President's charisma. This is clearly not the case with Bush. What did hold the Democrats back for a long time, however, was their fear of criticizing the President during the early days of the war on terror. Even in the run-up to the war on Iraq, it was hard to say more than "Gee, we should really be nicer to the French." And that is almost never a winning line in American politics.

But now that Bush is struggling to confront the challenges of occupation while also fighting off a bad economy, an intelligence scandal and the failure to find a substantial cache of WMD, his post-9/11 invulnerability has come to an end. All of the resentment that Democrats once had to hold back is now in the open. The question is, Will such intense emotions lead to victory in 2004, or just a marginalization of the party as a whole? Damned if I know. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion