Excellent post by Glenn Greenwald on how conservatism and the GOP under Bush devolved into a cult of personality and how liberalism can avoid the same - and to a large extent already has, in that liberals are far more liable to criticize Obama than conservatives were to criticize Bush.
It’s interesting that one of the right’s loudest criticisms of Obama is the bit about “The One,” that liberals follow him as blindly as the mice followed the pied piper. There’s clearly more than a little projection going on there - as Greenwald reminds us in a trip down memory lane:
Ambinder says that it wasn’t until the Miers nomination that the Right criticized Bush in any meaningful way. That’s pretty extraordinary, since that took place in September, 2005 — almost five full years into the Bush presidency. For the first five years, look at what happened:
The Right’s leading commentators saw their role as defending the Bush administration no matter what it did, rather than expressing their honest opinions, as Rush Limbaugh infamously admitted after the GOP lost control of Congress in the 2006 election: “I feel liberated. . . I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried.” Personalized hagiographies were churned out glorifying the President in borderline-religious tones. Conservative groups devoted themselves to blind defense of the White House — justifying whatever Bush did and turning themselves into a political arm of the administration — rather than exerting pressure for adherence to their agenda.
Conservatives who criticized Bush were deemed the enemy and were excommunicated: see this 2006 New York Times profile of Bruce Bartlett to see how that worked — “An Outspoken Conservative Loses his Place at the Table” — or look at how people like Andrew Sullivan were suddenly deemed “liberals” because of their criticisms of Bush. Those who, in general, criticized the President too harshly were deemed unpatriotic, standing with Terrorists, and suffering from personalized and emotional hatred (Bush Derangement Syndrome) — as though excessive criticism was some sort of offense against decency or even a personal failing. As Bill Kristol himself acknowledged about the Right during Bush’s first term: ”Bush was the movement and the cause.”
Some of this goes on on the left. But you would never hear an actual liberal say that Obama is the movement and the cause. This is why we’re still fighting over the idea of a public option; the left wants it whether or not the president wants it or not. Immigration sparked a similar fight on the right during the Bush years - but not until well into the Bush years.
