October 8, 2004 NY Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Ignorance Isn't Strength
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I
first used the word "Orwellian" to describe the Bush team in October
2000. Even then it was obvious that George W. Bush surrounds himself with
people who insist that up is down, and ignorance is strength. But the full
costs of his denial of reality are only now becoming clear.
President
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have an unparalleled ability to insulate
themselves from inconvenient facts. They lead a party that controls all three
branches of government, and face news media that in some cases are partisan
supporters, and in other cases are reluctant to state plainly that officials
aren't telling the truth. They also still enjoy the residue of the faith placed
in them after 9/11.
This
has allowed them to engage in what Orwell called "reality control."
In the world according to the Bush administration, our leaders are infallible,
and their policies always succeed. If the facts don't
fit that assumption, they just deny the facts.
As
a political strategy, reality control has worked very well. But as a strategy
for governing, it has led to predictable disaster. When leaders live in an
invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality.
In
the last few days we've seen some impressive demonstrations of reality control
at work. During the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Cheney insisted that "I have
not suggested there's a connection between
From
a political point of view, such exercises in denial have been very successful.
For example, the Bush administration has managed to convince many people that
its tax cuts, which go primarily to the wealthiest few percent of the
population, are populist measures benefiting middle-class families and small
businesses. (Under the administration's definition, anyone with "business
income" - a group that includes Dick Cheney and George Bush - is a
struggling small-business owner.)
The
administration has also managed to convince at least some people that its
economic record, which includes the worst employment performance in 70 years,
is a great success, and that the economy is "strong and getting
stronger." (The data to be released today, which are expected to improve
the numbers a bit, won't change the basic picture of a dismal four years.)
Officials
have even managed to convince many people that they are moving forward on
environmental policy. They boast of their "Clear Skies" plan even as
the inspector general of the E.P.A. declares that the enforcement of existing
air-quality rules has collapsed.
But
the political ability of the Bush administration to deny reality - to live in
an invented world in which everything is the way officials want it to be - has
led to an ongoing disaster in
How
did the occupation of
The
insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They wanted to
believe Ahmad Chalabi's promises that we'd be
welcomed with flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe
- months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were facing
a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops - that the attackers were
a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist
dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.
Why
did the economy perform so badly? Long after it was obvious to everyone outside
the administration that the tax-cut strategy wasn't an effective way of
creating jobs, administration officials kept promising huge job gains, any day
now. Nobody could tell them different.
Why
has the pursuit of terrorists been so unsuccessful? It has been obvious for
years that John Ashcroft isn't just scary; he's also scarily incompetent. But
inside the administration, he's considered the man for the job - and nobody can
say different.
The
point is that in the real world, as opposed to the political world, ignorance
isn't strength. A leader who has the political power to pretend that he's
infallible, and uses that power to avoid ever admitting mistakes, eventually
makes mistakes so large that they can't be covered up. And that's what's happening
to Mr. Bush.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com