Fathers and Sons: A Primer in Bad Politics

What makes bad politics is bad arguments and bad choices, not bad fathers. Some people said with complete earnestness that George W. Bush invaded Iraq to revenge Sadaam Hussein’s attempted assassination of Mr. Bush’s father, former President George H. W. Bush. Many at the time considered such a speculation as a reflection of the loony fringe on the left of U. S. politics.

Today, some people say that Barack Obama’s political agenda represents a channeling of the father he barely knew apart from dreams. Many now think of such speculations as the loony fringe on the right of U. S. politics.

There is a considerable difference between Dinesh D’ Souza and Newt Gingrich (who have indulged the latter speculation) and now nameless blame mongers who attacked George W. Bush. To put it mildly, what once passed for solidity on the right seems to be entrapped in the expressions of impotence that typically take the form of wild and vain imaginings in response to concrete policy initiatives as opposed to substantial reflections aimed at discrediting false premises.

It is nearly impossible to explain how such a fate has befallen our political discourse, apart from entertaining the serious possibility that D’Souza and Gingrich had always been over-rated to begin with. One hesitates to award grave consideration to such views as these, for fear of being thought to believe that there might actually be real argument to be weighed and sifted here. Perhaps the best thing to be said is to point out the most obvious thing: a president whose legal education was shaped at the hands of Harvard’s “critical legal studies” nomenklatura can hardly be thought to be channeling his father, when his entire vocabulary and every discernible objective comports so completely with the goals of the “oppressed peoples” mantra intoned religiously by critical legal studies. Why imagine that a scarcely reasoning youth imbibed notions of anti-colonial resentment from a father he barely knew at an age when he barely thought rather than from a gaggle of faculty with whom, in the maturity of intellectual exertion, he carefully deliberated the identical notions?

Will it be thought to be extreme to say that it makes no sense whatever?

Of John Adams one may fairly say that John Quincy Adams bore and sustained a tender and endearing memory in all that he did, including even his abandonment of his father’s political party for the party of his father’s fiercest opponent. It is no less true in politics than in love that sons may well revere their fathers while eschewing their paths. George H. W. Bush considered it unwise to invade Iraq proper; George W. Bush thought it wisdom to move the Archimedean lever of Middle Eastern politics. When it comes to fathers and sons, it is an errant errand to seek to understand policy from genetics rather than from the imperatives of statecraft. Let us give Mr. Obama his due: a serious refutation of inadequate arguments. For, if his politics fail that results from the failure of his argument and not his failed father.