America's Peculiar Amnesia

People have already forgotten how George W. Bush and the Republican Congress expanded government spending.
By Anne Applebaum
Slate.com
Posted Monday, Aug. 2, 2010

George W. Bush. Click image to expand.George W. BushHistorical amnesia is at once the most endearing and the most frustrating of American qualities. On the one hand, it means that—F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary—there really are second acts in American lives. People can move somewhere else, reinvent themselves, start again.

On the other hand, our inability to remember what our policy was last week—never mind last decade—drives outsiders crazy. We forget that we supported the dictator before we decided to destroy him. Then we can't understand why others, especially the dictator's subjects, don't always believe in the goodness of our intentions or the sincerity of our devotion to democracy.

Domestic policy is no different, as I learned from readers who wrote to denounce my column of two weeks ago. I had argued that Americans on both the left and the right have, for the last decade, consistently voted for high-spending members of Congress and consistently supported ever-higher levels of government intervention and regulation at all levels of public life. As a result, the federal government expanded under George W. Bush's administration at a rate that was, at least until President Barack Obama came along, totally unprecedented in U.S. history.

Alas, historical amnesia appears to have affected some readers, many of whom are under the impression that President Bush believed in small government and that recent Republican congressional leaders opposed federal spending.

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