More Bush Derangement Syndrome

Adam Kirsch, writing in the New York Sun, reviews the latest anti-Bush obscenity produced by a major lefty scholar.

When a man as distinguished as Patrice Higonnet — professor of history at Harvard, a leading scholar of France and the French Revolution — writes a book as bad as "Attendant Cruelties" (Other Press, 378 pages, $25.95), it is more than a shame, it is a symptom. What drove Mr. Higonnet to range so far from his professional pasture as to write this brief history of America? It was not any great expertise in the subject; the bulk of the book is a sketchy and conventional chronicle, assembled from secondary sources, and containing no facts or interpretations that will surprise any reader who paid attention in his or her 11th-grade U.S. History class. It was not any deep historical insight; for Mr. Higonnet's method is not to explain our history....

No, the reason why "Attendant Cruelties" got written is much simpler: It is Mr. Higonnet's overpowering hatred of President Bush..., a man whom he regards as evil incarnate? This is not an exaggeration. In the course of his book, Mr. Higonnet compares the president not just to Hitler — "We can understand him better if we understand what came before him. ... Hitler was a madman, but even he did not become chancellor of the German Reich just because he was a madman" — but also to Stalin: "What Stalinism was to utopian communism, Bushism is to the American creed."

With the illogicality of malice, Mr. Higonnet characterizes Mr. Bush as simultaneously incompetent and omnipotent, feckless and relentless, the bully of his advisers and the dupe of his advisers. Reckoning the sum of these contradictions tells us nothing about Mr. Bush or about America, but it tells us a great deal about the passionate, self-delighting, deeply irresponsible hatred that now prevails even among the most prestigious and best educated precincts of the Left. It is a book that Mr. Higonnet's sympathizers will read with vigorous nods, and everyone else will read with despairing shakes of the head.

Read the whole thing here.

This kind of malignant madness is widespread within both European and American academic circles. It is a major cultural marker of our times, and one that requires serious study. Unfortunately, the people best equipped to undertake such an investigation are those who are most severely crippled by Bush hatred.