Ignorance Isn't Strength
October 8, 2004
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 Iraq and 9/11."
After the release of the Duelfer report, which shows that
Saddam's weapons capabilities were deteriorating, not
advancing, at the time of the invasion, Mr. Cheney declared
that the report proved that "delay, defer, wait wasn't an
option."
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 Iraq and looming disaster elsewhere.
How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security
situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no
safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a
popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)
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.
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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
