President Bush And The Mandate Of Heaven

AFTER A week in which the combat deaths in Iraq reached 2,000, the Harriet Miers nomination collapsed, and Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff was indicted, can anyone doubt that Bush administration has lost the Mandate of Heaven?

Well, it depends whose side you are on.

Back in the good old days when China was ruled by the Son of Heaven the falterings and disasters of an aging dynasty were interpreted by the Chinese to mean that the emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven.

In modern America our professional journalists have a much better system of divining the Mandate of Heaven. They look at a scientific opinion poll of the president’s popularity and divine from that whether he should now be considered a “lame duck.”

In The Wall Street Journal last Friday, a Rorschach blot graph of the president’s approve/disapprove rating tagged “Reversed Fortune” was prominently displayed in the middle of a front-page article about the administration’s troubles and that “Bush Has Little Margin of Error.”

Probably the biggest problem the Bush administration faces is the weather. It certainly figured in the history of the Chinese. But for the weather Americans would probably be subjects of the global Chinese Empire. Back in 1421: The Year that China Discovered America, according to retired submarine officer Gavin Menzies, the Ming emperor Zhu Di sent out at enormous expense a vast fleet of thousands of ships to explore the world. It was a bold stroke that might have changed the world.

But two months after the fleet set sail lightning struck an imperial palace and started a fire that burned most of the newly-built Forbidden City to the ground. The disaster triggered insubordination in the imperial bureaucracy and rebellions on the frontiers. When the ships straggled back years later after sailing around the world, Emperor Zhu Di was dead. Under his frightened successor China turned inward and rejected the risk of imperialism and adventure.

Just as the emperor Zhu Di seemed helpless to prevent the destruction of the imperial palace, George W. Bush seems unable to prevent the current plague of hurricanes. In the disaster of Hurricane Katrina Democratic politicians were shocked that the federal government hesitated for days before rushing in to save the people of New Orleans from the incompetence of their state and local governments. Abbots of prestigious environmental monasteries recited from their global warming testaments and preached that hurricanes were the wages of sin, the consequence of overconsumption of nonrenewable resources. (However, global experts agree that the notion that the hurricanes were God’s punishment for the moral decline in modern society is extreme right-wing religious bigotry).

President Bush is also in trouble because he has seemed helpless to prevent other, less natural, disasters. He has seemed helpless to prevent gasoline prices from doubling over the past year, never mind that his political opponents work tirelessly to prevent the development of hydrocarbon energy resources and infrastructure. He is also seems helpless to prevent uncontrolled immigration, never mind that his political opponents work tirelessly to prevent enforcement of existing laws to identify and deport illegal immigrants.

These failures would be devastating were it not for the president’s remarkable achievements. In the face of a dangerous collapse in the capital markets he dodged a depression with vigorous tax rate cuts and low interest rates. In the face of a bold attack on the nation’s financial center he launched a military expedition that has freed 50 million people from brutal tyranny. In reckless disregard of global educated opinion he has planted and watered seedlings of consensual politics in a region that knew only the arid desert of political terror.

No empire—or political movement—loses the Mandate of Heaven until its leaders and supporters start to lose faith in their sacred mission. The Democratic Party lost its New Deal mandate in the long decade of the Sixties when it lost interest in containing communism and lost its faith in expert-led social and economic policymaking in the twin debacles of the Great Society and the Carter inflation. The Democratic Party of FDR and “Happy Days are Here Again” would never have surrendered the presidency in 1980 to a Hollywood “B” movie actor.

After a quarter-century of triumphs, from Reagan tax rate cuts to welfare reform to Bush tax rate cuts, from victory in the cold war to freedom for 50 million in the heart of the tyrannical Middle East, President Bush’s supporters feel confirmed in their conservative faith.

Only a partisan Democrat or a willing accomplice in the media could interpret the current crisis to mean that the conservative movement or the Republican Party is close to a crack-up or that President Bush has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

On the contrary, Republicans are spoiling for a fight—for the soul of the Supreme Court.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close