The real reason Hollywood stars and other idealistic celebrities hate George W. Bush so passionately and support Barack Obama so enthusiastically is very simple: Admitting that sometimes things just go wrong despite good intentions would prove the achievement of their desired utopia impossible.
To an idealist, that is intolerable, and any means of preventing the admission of that truth are acceptable and in fact necessary.
Appearing at the London (UK) Film Festival to promote the world premiere of their new film, Frost/Nixon, actor Kevin Bacon and director Ron Howard expressed strong support for presidential candidate Barack Obama. Their film recreates a widely watched series of interviews between former president Richard Nixon and smarmy UK talk-show host David Frost that took place in the 1970s.
The film must be a labor of love of some bizarre sort, given that no one with any sense could possibly care less about Richard Nixon three and a half decades after his resignation from office. Lynyrd Skynyrd got it right at the time:
Watergate does not bother me.
Does your conscience bother you?
Evidently in the case of the people behind this film, it still does, and the answer for them is Obama.
One can see why Hollywood and the rest of the American culture keep revisiting Nixon and this particular series of interviews, however (the film is based on a stage play). It’s one of the great triumphs of the Left and the media in the past half-century: the taking down of a sitting president. It’s the only one, actually, and it’s an entirely negative achievement, of course. Moreover, its one real consequence, the election and presidency of Jimmy Carter, is certainly one of the low points of American history.
Nonetheless, for the American Left the downfall of Richard Nixon represents a bright, shining moment of unalloyed triumph.
Reuters reports that Howard said America had lost lustre in the world (there’s an insight), and that grotesque tax increases and negotiating with terrorists would be just the thing to restore us to our former glory during the Carter and Clinton eras:
"We’ve been through a very troubling eight years and times are complicated, the United States’ standing has fallen," Howard told Reuters on the red carpet.
"I think we’re a great country … and I’m not being idealistic. I feel that we stand for something very positive and I think Obama would put that foot forward."
Counting political chickens that appear to be almost hatched, Bacon looked forward to the wonderful utopia to come:
Bacon, who described himself as a life-long Democrat, added that he thought Obama was going to be a "fantastic president."
"I think throughout this campaign we’ve seen the steady hand, the even hand, and I would be thrilled if he was our next president."
Meanwhile, music nightmare Madonna, performing in concert in Boston, urged the audience to vote for Obama.
And in an interview for a different Reuters story, W director Oliver Stone likened the immediate post-9/11 years of the Bush presidency as resembling the conditions in George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps setting a new record for hyperbole, a stunning accomplishment given the masterpieces of rhetorical exaggeration created by representatives of both political parties:
The 2000-2003 period (of the Bush presidency) was a veiled Orwellian masterpiece, where they closed off all documents and fired anyone in the inner circle who talked to the press. This guy was infallible for three years. It was only in about 2004-2005 that this was starting to come out. Without all the investigative reporters, where would we be?
Where indeed? Nobody knew what was going on during the runup to the Iraq War, because the White House had perfect information but kept it all secret because they just wanted to have a war. We were fooled. That’s what happened.
Or perhaps we all made a bad judgment based on the best information available at the time. Perhaps people had good intentions and guessed wrong. Perhaps that’s just the way things go in this inevitably imperfect world.
No, no, a thousand times no!, say the Oliver Stones of the world. If that were true, there would be no answer to such worldly imperfections, and it would be simply impossible for us ever to finish building the glorious, perfect utopia of peace, plenty, and equality the Oliver Stones of the world see in their beautiful dreams.
But pursue it they must. The alternative—a realistic view of the world and an acceptance of the limitations of human nature and the human condition—is too horrible to contemplate.
Thus the real answer must lie in some psychological disease within President Bush exacerbated by the watching of too many John Wayne movies, as Stone theorizes in the Reuters interview:
Bush grew up under the curse of being the first son and the black sheep of the family and he had to prove himself stronger (than his father). So for him, winning a second term was crucial and above all finishing the job in Iraq. I think Bush personalizes a very complex series of world situations and makes them into issues of his own ego, which I call cowboy or John Wayne-like.
It’s most interesting indeed that Stone would accuse Bush of "personalizing a complex series of world situations." If anybody seems to have taken the events of the past eight years personally, it’s Bush’s opponents on the Left. Opposition to Bush’s policies is richly justified, but the intense personal hatred directed his way has been utterly irrational. Something more has been at work.
It is this: the utopians’ hatred of Bush is rather like a dog barking at its image in a mirror—it was Bush’s idealistic pursuit of the utopian dream of imposing modern Western values on societies not at all ready for them (the Arab, Muslim Middle East) that led to the deaths and expense in Iraq that they have so furiously denounced.
As a classical liberal, I personally disagree (in the strongest possible terms) with Bush’s decision to engage in nation-building in Iraq, but I won’t pretend that the administration had no reasonable arguments for it or that the American people were duped into undertaking it. (How could such a monumental thing be achieved by an administration so thoroughly incompetent as its opponents correctly characterize this one as having been?)
No, the reality is that life is messy, and even good people and good nations make mistakes. The very idealism that motivates Bush’s enemies on the Left is what motivated him to undertake the Iraq War and domestic government overspending that have diminished America’s economic productivity and stature on the world stage.
Having ideals is a good thing, but they must always be tempered by realism, especially when government coercion of others is involved. That’s where classical liberal principles are essential: they limit what people can be allowed to force on one another in the pursuit of worldly perfection or any other desire.
The Reuters article on the Nixon/Frost premiere concluded with an amusingly arch observation:
Hollywood has a reputation for being anti-Bush, but industry experts point out that with his re-election in 2004,
and a series of Iraq war movies that turned out to be box office flops, its impact on what happens next month may be limited.
To say the least. However, the utopianism these extaordinarily privileged people represent is a huge force in the American culture and society, and the relentless pursuit of this fevered dream is the real danger to our safety, prosperity, and peace of mind.