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Judgements Of History

I tend to agree with Ross that the survey of historians that concluded Bush to be the worst President in history cannot be taken very seriously.  First of all, it is almost impossible for contemporaries to give a balanced assessment of a President, especially one who has become as unpopular as this one, and as […]

I tend to agree with Ross that the survey of historians that concluded Bush to be the worst President in history cannot be taken very seriously.  First of all, it is almost impossible for contemporaries to give a balanced assessment of a President, especially one who has become as unpopular as this one, and as historians we should know that the full effects of Bush’s decisions will not be known for decades.  Second, most presidential historians are big fans of Presidents who usurped power, waged wars, abused their offices and did Big Things, so it is really unfair to laud all the others who did this and then disregard Bush, whose “accomplishments” in these areas are remarkable.  Yglesias is right about this, and perhaps in time Bush’s reputation will be rehabilitated, with even less justification, just as Truman’s was. 

Still, I think you can put together a pretty damning moral indictment of his administration as one of the least honest and most unjust administrations, but that is a rather different question, and even then he is still a piker compared to FDR, Lincoln and Wilson.  When historians judge heads of state they normally try to separate their moral disapproval of the man’s actions as much as possible and to consider his historical significance and his importance to later political and institutional history.  Typically, American Presidents receive poor rankings in these occasional polls of historians if they are perceived to have left no enduring legacy (hence the embarrassing legacy-hunting that mediocre Presidents engage in as a way of being remembered as more significant than they were).  Since President Bush has mired us in Iraq and ensured that the next administration will have to pick up the pieces, he will certainly be remembered as one of the more significant Presidents, but not necessarily in a positive way.  If in another five or ten years, God forbid, some Iraqi-born jihadi radicalised by 5+ years of war in his home country launches a significant terrorist attack against U.S interests, Bush’s legacy will be remembered very differently.  Likewise, I expect his father’s legacy will be seen as much worse in another 50 or 75 years than most of us today seem to regard it to the extent that his involvement in the first Gulf War ensnared the United States in the Gulf and contributed to the conditions that have brought us to the current pass.

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