George Bush’s abject failure requires an exploration of its roots, the better to avoid at least one path towards repetition. It’s common nowadays for conservatives to claim Bush failed because he deviated from their faith. Paul Krugman, amongst others, disagrees, seeing Bush as in continuity with Republicanism since McCarthy and Nixon, and his failures due not to Bush’s deviation from it, but, rather, his actualization of it. In this formulation, Republicanism/Bushism becomes yet another Big Idea to have failed.
One might, as RMJ says on the Eschaton board this morning, go further to point out that any Big Idea is intrinsically flawed, that, left or right, religious or scientific, philosophical or emotionally actualizing or whatever, a Big Idea is an incomplete representation of reality, that adopting a Big Idea as a unitary explanation for the world inevitably distorts one’s perception to the extent that failure, or, worse, evil is inevitable.
There are alternatives. RMJ mentions some. Karl Popper wrote of the poverty of historicism, and advocated piecemeal social engineering as far less totalitarian and more likely ameliorative. Isaiah Berlin, too, had little patience with, and much fear of, those who would reduce history to a unitary explanation, thereby making events inevitable, or supplying unwonted justification for them. Jane Jacobs’ vision of cities as organic outgrowths of the human lives lived in them, as opposed to grand urban renewal schemes imposed from without, and similar critics of architectural Big Ideas, also come to mind.
Of course, these, too, might be called Big Ideas. To avoid entrapment within them, perhaps the observation that any Big Idea is incomplete, that one must go without it, question it, modify it, recognize that it will require change in response to events inevitably unforeseen, is the way out. And, in a political context, to view a lack of purity–on the left as well as on the right–as inevitable, even welcome, though I anticipate being occasionally opposed to Obama from the left…
I think a few have withstood the test of time, though. Sorry to be saccharine, but one is ‘Do unto others’, and it works really well.
But as to failed ideology – I think we’ve discovered another immutable truth. Deregulation doesn’t work.
And Krugman is right.