Opening up the "Texas model."
Johnson's ranch, west of Austin on the Pedernales River, was in a region inhabited by people of German, Czech and Scandinavian descent. These folks tended to be Unionist, liberal and anti-slavery, trying to preserve a vibrant pluralist tradition in the heart of Texas. Bush's Crawford ranch, near Waco, is located in a region with predominantly Anglo-Celtic stock, people who have tended to be violent, militaristic and disdainful of hard labor and intellectual achievement. Over the last 30 years, the latter model has assumed nearly complete political ascendancy in Texas, and since 2001 has, for the first time, succeeded in translating its peculiar religious, militarist and economic compulsions into national and international policy.
If Bush is a feudalist of a certain kind, Michael Lind offers invaluable help in situating him as a partisan of Southernomics in Made in Texas. In a nutshell, Southernomics believes in anti-unionist, low-wage, low-service crony capitalism based on primitive extraction rather than technologically efficient production. Current proposals for guest worker programs that deprive immigrants of civil rights are the embodiment of the school.
When it comes to foreign policy, Lind describes Bush's militarism as a "Frankensteinian operation" joining "the bodiless head of Northeastern neoconservatism onto the headless body of Southern fundamentalism." Both Southern Protestant fundamentalists and Jewish neoconservatives view themselves as embattled minorities within their own ethnic groups, while the fierce religiosity of Anglo-Celtic Texans, traceable to Ulster and Scotland, provides an opportunity for neoconservatives to complete their plan for the "Israelization of American foreign policy."
Lind boldly concludes that Bush's conservative imperialism has "no precedents in U.S. foreign policy" but resembles most closely "nineteenth-century British imperialism." It was thus no coincidence that 19th-century British imperialists found allies among the Southern planter class, content to have the United States remain the agricultural resource colony of the British empire. The economic nationalist tradition of Hamilton, Clay and Lincoln is in opposition to this tradition. This, says Lind, is how we should understand the current unilateralist, laissez-faire, free-trade model espoused by the Southern-dominated American right, in flat repudiation of the post-1945 internationalist world order.
Lind doesn't mince words in raising the alarm: "For the sake of America as well as the world, it is important that the proponents of this bizarre strategy be quickly removed from power along with George W. Bush by America's voters." Otherwise, the devout Protestant Southern militarists will lead America down the same self-destructive path that the "British imperial officer corps, the Prussian Junkers, and the Japanese samurai" led their respective countries in earlier generations.
The structural dimensions of the Southern takeover are only half the story. How does a model so at odds with the instincts of the majority of the American people, certainly those in the coastal conurbations, become political reality? For that, we must turn to the personalities of Bush and his backers, and none is more important than his key political adviser Karl Christian Rove.
One disconcerting fact that emerges from two recent books on the subject-Boy Genius by Lou Dubose et. al., and Bush's Brain by James Moore and Wayne Slater-is the length of time Rove had Bush in his sights as his ultimate political prize. In 1990, Bush was seriously considering making a run for governor of Texas, but was dissuaded by the elder Bush's White House for fear that the son's candidacy might become a referendum on the father's presidency. It is to Rove's credit that he disciplined Bush enough around certain resonating themes-social promotion in education, juvenile crime, welfare reform and tort reform-that he defeated a seemingly invincible Ann Richards in his 1994 run for the governor's office.
In both books, Rove comes across as the man with the plan, a plan so detailed and precise that he never deviated an inch from it, beginning from his days in the Nixon era as a college Republican specializing in dirty tricks. In this, Rove was 30 years ahead of his time. More than any single individual, he transformed Texas from a Democratic state to a Republican state. Beginning with his victory with Governor Bill Clements in 1978, he recruited other stars like Phil Gramm (whom he convinced to switch from the Democratic party), Kay Bailey Hutchison, Rick Perry and of course, his star pupil, Bush himself.
In Bush's Brain, one Democrat claims after the 2002 election that Rove is "single-handedly dismantling the Democratic party." Boy Genius notes that even as a hyper-competitive high-school debater and college political operative in the Nixonian mold, friends noticed a lack of emotion or soul in him. That characteristic marks the actual route through which the premodern policies of the Bush administration have become political fact, steamrolling all opposition in the process.
The Rove that emerges from the two books is a chilling figure. In Bush's Brain, one of Rove's political victims says we should be worried about the extent of this man's influence in the making of domestic and foreign policy. Quite possibly, both books suggest, Rove is not only kingmaker, but king himself.
Dubose, Reid and Cannon's Boy Genius does a rather superficial job of recounting the various underhanded tactics that are Rove's trademarks. Moore and Slater's narrative is more petrifying because it is more detailed and based on extensive personal interviews with Rove's victims and allies alike, while Boy Genius seems too indebted to Dubose's earlier primer on Bush, Shrub (2000), co-written with Molly Ivins.
But both books do examine the history of Rove's dirty tricks. Rove all but admitted to being allied to an FBI agent named Greg Rampton, who was repeatedly involved in pursuing Rove opponents in Texas, in particular bringing about the downfall of popular Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower and his staff. On the eve of a 1986 debate between incumbent Democratic governor Mark White and Rove's embattled client Bill Clements, Rove called a press conference to announce the discovery of a bug in his office, implying that it had been planted by the White campaign (by all accounts, Rove himself seems to have planted the bug). Rove exposed emerging Democratic star Lena Guerrero, Railroad Commissioner under Governor Ann Richards, for lying about having finished college, destroying her career. Roveian rumors about Richards' lesbianism hurt her during her 1994 campaign. When Tom Pauken, the Texas Republican party chair, crossed Rove by criticizing Governor Bush's policies, Rove persecuted him until his career was effectively over.
In the end, despite their persuasiveness, both books remain star-struck by Rove's legacy. They both enshrine Rove as the single most important political operator in American history. But without the appeal of Southernomics, and its allied feudal-religious culture, in Texas and the rest of the South and West, Rove's dream would have remained just that. He would still be a man ahead of, or out of touch with, his time. Had it not been for the 2000 election, would we now be talking of Rove as a genius, or as someone too smart by half who got outmaneuvered by Al Gore's middle-of-the-road policies? Before September 11, Rove's premier candidate was on his way to becoming the most quickly failing president in modern times, and barring the attacks, there would have been no scope for Rove's strategic calculations on steel tariffs, farm subsidies or Homeland Security during the 2002 elections.
Rove looks like a genius, and probably is, but the bigger story is the economic and cultural transformation that his brand of political calculation has allowed to succeed. That's where Lind comes in, explaining the substance of the Texas-Confederate model. In the Bush-Rove alliance, substance and form perfectly, radically intertwine.