George W. Bush: The Undemocratic President

There have been a lot of criticisms of President Bush and the manner in which both he and the Republican Party have governed America for the past four years. Some of those criticisms are unfair and unreasonable, but there remains at their core an important point to be made: the current administration is far less democratic than it should be.

Writing in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait argues that there are two ways in which the Bush administration has fundamentally weakened democracy in America. The first involves the manner in which the administration has allowed for the free flow of information. By restricting access to information and misleading people about the truth on a wide variety of issues, President Bush has impeded people’s ability to evaluate his policies and create informed opinions about what the nation should do, two things which are necessary to a functioning democracy:

Bush and his allies have been described as partisan or bare-knuckled, but the problem is more fundamental than that. They have routinely violated norms of political conduct, smothered information necessary for informed public debate, and illegitimately exploited government power to perpetuate their rule. These habits are not just mean and nasty. They're undemocratic. ... [D]emocracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he's abandoning American democracy, but that he's weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency. 

Since Franklin Roosevelt made press conferences a regular feature, Bush has held fewer of them than any president--14 solo press conferences, as compared with Bill Clinton's 41 and George H.W. Bush's 77 at this point in their presidencies. When he does appear before the press, Bush routinely refuses to answer difficult questions. ... The president is so evasive that his technique has become a point of pride for his admirers. "Watching President Bush's press conference Tuesday night, you could see why he drives the press crazy," wrote Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard this April. "No matter what they asked, his answer was invariably the same." 

"For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters," concluded a long investigation by U.S. News & World Report last December. "The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government." Consider just one example. Bush's 2004 budget cut grants to the states (outside of Medicaid, which rises automatically) by 2.4 percent. After statehouses complained, the administration announced it would cease publishing Budget Information for States, which documents how much states receive from various federal programs. (The administration claimed it did so to save on printing costs.) The result, as Alysoun McLaughlin of the National Conference of State Legislatures told The Washington Post: "There's no one place in the public domain for this information anymore." 

Don't all politicians fudge the truth from time to time? Sure. The difference is that, over the last few years, misinformation has become fundamental, rather than incidental, to the political process. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution puts it, "What's striking is the extent of [manipulation] in this administration. The most ambitious and fundamental proposals have been cloaked in language that's designed to mislead." This dishonesty is necessary because the policies do not reflect the will of the majority. As a forthcoming paper on the 2001 tax cut by Yale's Jacob Hacker and Harvard's Paul Pierson notes, "For those committed to core principles of democratic governance, the picture that emerges is unsettling. On the central questions of how large the tax cut should be and how its benefits should be distributed, the preferences of a majority of voters appear to have been systematically ignored. Far from ruling the polity, average voters proved vulnerable to systematic and extensive manipulation." 

Second, Chait argues that in addition to their obsession with secrecy the Bush administration has also worked to blur the distinctions between the government an the Republican Party. This distinction is necessary for two reasons: first, the separation allows for changes in power because the incumbent party finds it more difficult to abuse government power for partisan political gains; second, because the nation’s needs and a political party’s needs aren’t always the same — thus, when the government is used for the sake of the latter then the former will suffer and everyone loses.

[L]imits on such abuses are a key determinant of a democracy's strength. This is why we don't allow the president to, say, force federal employees to donate to his campaign, or sic the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on his critics. If the incumbent could turn the entire government into an apparatus of his political party, then dislodging incumbents would become prohibitively difficult. That's precisely what happens in weak democracies--classic "one-and-a-half party" states like Singapore and Paraguay--where ruling parties can hold power for decades despite superficially free elections. 

Bush's use of the Department of Health and Human Services to fund propaganda on behalf of its Medicare bill was not an isolated instance. After cutting taxes in 2001, the IRS mailed out promotional notices to the public, gushing, "We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed--and President George W. Bush signed into law--the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which provides long-term tax relief for all Americans who pay income taxes." (Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics told the Times, "I've never heard of anything like this, certainly not from the IRS, certainly not with this rah-rah tone. It's outrageous.") When the checks did arrive, they were helpfully emblazoned with Bush's catchphrase, "Tax relief for America's workers." 

As the Iraq war began last year, Republicans argued that patriotism required the passage of Bush's tax cuts. "When our troops are over there fighting," GOP Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison put it, "we don't want partisan bickering to be what they see on television from back home." Once you have equated the security of the state with the welfare of a political party, it's no great leap to turn the former into an instrument of the latter. In May of last year, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay ordered the Department of Homeland Security to track down an airplane carrying Democratic legislators fleeing Texas in order to foil a GOP redistricting effort. Last July, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas ordered Capitol Police to break up a meeting of Democratic representatives.

The GOP, for example, routinely denies Democrats the right to propose or amend legislation. As a result, popular reforms--such as allowing the importation of prescription drugs from Canada--have never come to a vote, even though a majority of representatives support them. Republicans restrict debate to an hour or less on major legislation. They bring bills to the floor minutes before they are to be voted on, allowing members (and reporters) almost no chance to understand the details before they are passed.

Chait believes that many people do not and will not take the above too seriously because they have a strong prior commitment to the belief that “the system works.” In this, they feel that they are supported by incidents in the past, like President Nixon’s misdeeds, which were uncovered and dealt with by “the system.” To a degree, they are correct — but not entirely.

You see, Chait explains that the “system” has only worked because of the actions of people with good intentions, not in spite of people with bad intentions. When sufficient numbers of both Democrats and Republicans band together to put the nation’s interests ahead of party interests, then the system is indeed able to work properly by restricting misdeeds and bringing people to justice.

Currently, though, that doesn’t appear to be possible. People in the administration are not ashamed of the manner in which they have abused their power and Republican leaders in the Congress are only to happy to abuse their authority to rig votes. There are plenty of Republicans in both the Senate and the House who would be willing to stand up and fight for what is right, but the way the rules (not to mention money) are structured that just isn’t feasible.

Thus, politicians who don’t respect the social and civil requirements for a real democracy, as opposed to a sham democracy, are able to hold on to power and continue misleading voters in a manner that allows them to continue their abuses of government machinery. I wrote above that the current administration is far less democratic than it should be, but are they any less democratic than we deserve? In a nation where so few people vote and so many people think that things like torturing detainees in secret facilities is acceptable, perhaps not. Perhaps a sham democracy is Americans will get because that is the best they can maintain, socially and politically. Only time will tell just how much damage they (and we) will end up doing to America.

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