In December 2003, Dr. Charles Krauthammer diagnosed a new mental disorder, Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), which he defined as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.” Krauthammer, trained as a psychiatrist, had already diagnosed the disorder now known as “secondary mania” (see Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), so he could spot new maladies as well as any other shrink. He had hoped that BDS might be confined to, as he put it, “the Upper West Side and the tonier parts of Los Angeles,” but after twelve years of history-book reviewing, I’m afraid I have to report that BDS has now reached epidemic levels in the history departments of the Anglo-American academy. Here are my findings, which I present for peer review. Most of the books I mention are well written and scholarly, but all of them unaccountably veer off into denunciations of George W. Bush, even though they are totally unconnected with the 43rd president, the Iraq War, or neoconservatism.
In Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009) — a book that ends with Woodrow Wilson’s presidency — for example, the historian Jackson Lears writes that President Bush “revived all the old, destructive fantasies — the belief in America’s capacity to save the world; the faith in the revitalizing powers of combat; the cult of manly toughness in foreign policy.” He adds that 9/11 “brought militarism back with a vengeance, providing the idea of regenerative war with a luster it had not enjoyed (outside Fascist circles) for nearly a century.” Reviewing Cullen Murphy’s book on the Spanish Inquisition, God’s Jury (2012), Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker argued that the institution’s “thumbprint is everywhere. . . . Even our own Guantanamo-making apparatus . . . has a forebear in Torquemada and the men in the red hats,” adding (correctly) that the book was “racing back and forth in history from Torquemada to Dick Cheney.” (The Spanish Inquisition, already long defunct, was abolished in 1834.)
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