Weisberg and the narrative of Bush

Writing about the construction of campaign narratives reminds me of a Jacob Weisberg quote about his new Bush book that has been bugging me for a while. Weisberg, who is the editor of Slate, is known as one of the smartest political journalists in Washington, which is why I think this quote from his Fresh Air appearance earlier this year is so revealing and important:

I think when you look at [Bush's presidency] in the way that I have, you end up in a position where you say nothing Bush did was surprising. If you understood the family relationships, if you understood his competition with his brother Jeb, if you understood the way he grew up in the shadow of his father, it all starts to be clear; and I think it was all certainly knowable by 2004, but mostly knowable in 2000.

The epistemological problem with this statement should be clear to anyone who has ever thought seriously about the contingency of history (sadly, a category that includes very few journalists). When Weisberg says that "nothing Bush did was surprising... [i]f you understood the family relationships, if you understood his competition with his brother Jeb, if you understood the way he grew up in the shadow of his father," what he means is that you can construct a narrative that rationalizes observed events by attributing them to visible causes (i.e. Bush's family history). The problem is that all history seems obvious and inevitable after the fact. However, making up post hoc narratives doesn't mean that we actually understand the causes of Bush's behavior. If Bush's presidency had gone differently, an equally intelligent writer could probably construct an equally plausible explanation based on that same family history. An identical argument applies to all the post hoc narratives that political journalists construct to "explain" whatever happens during campaigns, presidencies, etc.

I haven't read Weisberg's book, but Jacob Heilbrunn suggests that the whole volume suffers from this problem in an otherwise positive Washington Monthly review:

Instead of cudgeling Bush for his manifest shortcomings, however, Weisberg embarks upon a kind of psycho-biography in an attempt to explain what is really behind these character flaws and why the Decider decides as he does.

Weisberg locates the answer in the early history of the Bush family. The tensions between the Walker and Bush clans, he argues, formed the essential backdrop to George W.'s own troubled life and presidency...

In contrast to his father, he refused to approach the business systematically. Instead, George W., "who thought success was a matter of rolling the dice with borrowed money, never struck lucky." Sound familiar? It was Bush's pattern: decades later, in Iraq, he gambled again and lost. As Weisberg sees it, "Driven by family demons, overflowing with confidence, and lacking any capacity for self-knowledge, Bush seems to me to have done precisely what we should have expected of him."

What Weisberg means by this isn't simply that Bush flubbed up. It's that it was almost preordained, in large part because he engaged in a form of intellectual mutilation by rendering himself as incurious as possible...

The British historian Sir Herbert Butterfield referred to the "Whig interpretation of history," in which each event of the past is interpreted as inevitably leading to the strengthening of liberty and progress worldwide. Weisberg, who traces Bush's sins backward to his ancestors, may be engaging in a reverse form of Whiggism. He essentially contends that character is destiny, which would strike many historians, who are interested in larger trends and forces, as somewhat anachronistic. Missing in Weisberg's meditation on Bush is a larger context that takes into account the GOP's capture by the far right. Bush wasn't operating in a vacuum, and we know he isn't much of a brooder. How much of his presidency has been shaped by psychological forces, and how much by sheer opportunism?

We shouldn't focus just on Weisberg, however. Biography is an intellectually bankrupt genre, as Louis Menand pointed out in a critique published in The New Yorker last year that applies equally well to a great deal of political journalism:

[T]he premise of biographies is that the private can account for the public, that the subject’s accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history, and this premise is the justification for digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the shameful and getting it all into print... [T]he premise poses a few problems.

For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others....

[The biographer Meryle] Secrest subscribes to this distinction between (as she puts it) “the private truth versus the public façade, appearance versus reality.” She is also, like many biographers, a believer in turning points—“pivotal moments in a person’s life when a single decision alters the future irrevocably.” It’s delightful to find (never concoct!) such moments, in which a chance encounter or a sudden revelation changes an ordinary life into the kind of life that people get paid to write books about, since those moments enable the biographer to construct the sort of conversion narrative, or Dick Whittington before-and-after story, that readers find familiar and take pleasure in...

The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the reader’s. We know what Coltrane or Cleopatra or Churchill achieved when we pick up the book, and we process the stuff we didn’t know, about their childhoods and their love lives and their abuse of whatever substances they may have abused, with this knowledge in mind. We are, in effect, helping the biographer do the work, because, like the biographer, we’re reading with an already formed image of the subject in our heads...

I would go so far as to say that most failures of political journalism result from a failure to grasp this epistemological problem. (Discuss!)

Update 4/16 8:25 AM -- Here's an excellent suggestion from comments about how to conduct a scientific test of this approach:

If it's as simple as Swami Weisberg claims, why don't we throw him some money for one of those experiments you were just talking about? Once we know who the Democratic nominee is, give him $100,000 (I'm being generous here) and a few months off with the express goal of researching the family history of McCain and Obama/Clinton and writing prospective biographies of how their presidencies will go. Then in 4 or 8 years, when that presidency is over, we can open that biography and compare it to reality. If Weisberg was close to right, let's hail him as a genius. If not, he can publicly admit that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about.

Comments

[Ben]

If it's as simple as Swami Weisberg claims, why don't we throw him some money for one of those experiments you were just talking about?
Once we know who the Democratic nominee is, give him $100,000 (I'm being generous here) and a few months off with the express goal of researching the family history of McCain and Obama/Clinton and writing prospective biographies of how their presidencies will go. Then in 4 or 8 years, when that presidency is over, we can open that biography and compare it to reality. If Weisberg was close to right, let's hail him as a genius. If not, he can publicly admit that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about.

[otey]

Great post Brendan. The Whiggism fallacy should be better understood. Very few people understand it, so lots of people slip into using it.

Gordon Woods has a wonderful discussion of it in his Revolutionary Characters book. See his chapter on Burr.

Why it isn't talked about more ought to be the subject of a future post. It ought to be taught in Journalism 101. Turns out it's not taught at all and little understood.

[David]

What Brendan describes is the daily fare on the financial pages. E.g., today Reuters wrote, "Wall St jumps as corporate profits reassure." If the financial reporter could actually predict the movement of the stock market in advance, s/he would be an investment wizard and very rich. However, after the fact, there's always a way to attribute the movement of the market to some cause.