Bush's White Man's Burden

In March, I posted a comment on President Bush's lunch with a group of neo-conservative luminaries and Andrew Roberts, an English historian who enthusiastically praises British and American imperialism and views Bush as an even greater leader than Churchill. At that point, I thought that the main significance of that particular conservative get-together was that Bush is so weak that he can't enjoy even the smallest group hug with his allies on the right without being ripped to shreds by liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald.

Now it appears that there's more to the Bush/ Roberts connection. Actually, Bush entertained Roberts for three hours and was so enthused that Roberts' wife "told the London Observer, "I thought I had a crush on him, but it's nothing like the crush President Bush has on him.'" Talk about male-bonding homoeroticism! More significant is the fact that Roberts appears to be a racist and an apologist for mass murder. According to Johann Hari in The New Republic (via Matthew Yglesias), Roberts has spoken at a dinner for the Springbok Club, "a group that regards itself as a shadow white government of South Africa and calls for "the re-establishment of civilized European rule throughout the African continent.'" Likewise, Roberts has written justifications of the Amritsar massacre in which British troops opened fire on 10,000 Indians engaged in a peaceful protest.

George Bush's crush on Andrew Roberts is a symbol of both past and present for George Bush. There is little discussion of the extent to which Bush's leadership style has been influenced by his roots in the white elite of Midland, Texas. Bush has both sides of the Southern male outlook. Having grown up toward the end of the segregation period, Bush has the typical puffed-up cockiness and abrasiveness of segregation-era whites, an attitude that has its origin in the assumed right of white men to treat blacks as they please. Bush may never have been a racist, but his general attitude toward the world was shaped by white supremacy nonetheless. Thus, the white supremacy that informs the history writing of Andrew Roberts mirrors the white supremacy that shaped George Bush's way of dealing with the world.

It also says a great deal about Bush's present condition that his most prominent academic champion is as professionally marginal and racist as Andrew Roberts. Bush's personal constituency gets smaller and smaller as he nears the end of his second term. There's Laura, Dick and Lynne Cheney, the guys at the American Enterprise Institute, and media personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fred Barnes. The circles in which George Bush feels at home get narrower and narrower as his administration flounders, so narrow that it's as if Cindy Sheehan was haunting the White House as well as the ranch in Crawford, Texas.