Political journalist Michael Lind has nothing but well-documented contempt for his fellow Texan, President George W. Bush. In his new book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, Lind describes Bush’s Texas conservatism as a combination of “seventeenth-century religion, eighteenth-century economics, and nineteenth-century imperialism.” Made In Texas views Bush as a product of a culture that is more of the plantation South than the egalitarian and free-wheeling West. Lind, former Washington editor of Harper’s, identifies it as a culture that believes in profligate use of land, cheap labor, ethnic and religious homogeneity and class privilege. Examining each element education, favorite charities, residential preferences, church affiliation, attitudes toward hard work and science Lind attempts to demonstrate why Bush, in his opinion, has a civilized manner atop a socially malignant belief system. He finds the president’s religious outlook troubling. “In the early years of the Information Age,” Lind notes, “when a scientific and technological revolution was transforming civilization, one of the issues that fascinated George W. Bush was the question of whether non-Christians will go to heaven or hell.” Nor does Lind find Bush’s economic perspective he calls it “Southernomics” measurably more enlightened. Instead of valuing efficiency and labor-saving technology, Lind says, Southernomics prefers the old imperialist way: finding and using more natural resources and incubating a less expensive workforce of foreigners or illegal aliens.
Changing circumstances have a way of altering the most reasonable speculations about what politicians will do. But Bush-watchers will find Made In Texas an interesting look at the roots of this president’s behavior.
