I haven’t read a thing yet by Andrew Bacevich that hasn’t been right on. Please read this entire article entitled "The Semiwarriors," which does as concise and insightful a job as I know to describe how we arrived in our current predicament. He ends with these paragraphs:
Democrats bemoan the failures of the Bush Administration, and with good cause. Yet none of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of checks and balances. In this regard, the views of Republicans and Democrats align precisely. The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.
In Washington and in national politics more generally, the Schlesinger Rule remains sacrosanct. Named in honor of the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., eminent historian and on-again, off-again enthusiast of presidential activism, the rule goes like this: When the other party does it, it’s an abuse of power; when my own party does it, it’s dynamic leadership.
The press plays the role of enabler. Having had a field day recording President Bush’s triumphal procession from one spectacular blunder to the next–with Iraq, Katrina and now Walter Reed vying for top honors–reporters can’t be bothered to assess the implications of these gaffes. They are already turning to the next Big Story: handicapping the imperial succession. Is it Hillary’s turn? Will Obama’s allure last? Can McCain and Giuliani sell themselves to the Christian right? For as long as members of the media can recall, the presidency has been the biggest story in town; they have a vested interested in preserving it.
But in their contempt for politicians and journalists, Americans should not be too quick to let themselves off the hook. Any serious effort to reduce the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions would imply rethinking the premises of US foreign policy, based on self-aggrandizing assumptions about American wisdom, competence and prerogatives and about the capacity of others to manage their own affairs. Given our chronic inability–or is it unwillingness?–to see the world as it is and to see ourselves as we really are, such a reassessment seems exceedingly unlikely. In an age of the citizen as consumer-spectator, Americans care enough to complain, but not nearly enough to act. Long live the emperor.
We’ve developed the mentality of an empire without really choosing to become one. Read the rest of the article to see how Bacevich traces this evolution starting in January of 1933:
In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became President, the District of Columbia was merely a seat of government and the United States was still a republic. When FDR’s successor left office twenty years later, Washington fancied itself the center of the universe, with the United States now the self-anointed Leader of the Free World. As Cullen Murphy observes in Are We Rome?, a mordantly funny essay filled with arresting observations, this transformation of status fostered large delusions: "that the world is small, that society is malleable, and that the capital’s stance is paramount." To reside in the imperial city was to believe that "assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is."
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