No more Bushes

Is anyone surprised that Jeb Bush is mimicking the liberal approach of lionizing dead conservatives at the expense of those who are still alive? Who’s the next conservative icon to whom we don’t measure up — Goldwater? WFB? Lincoln? Add that to Margaret Spellings badmouthing school choice and Bush minion Mark McKinnon joining No Labels, among other things, and I think we can safely say we’ve had enough Bushism to last the nation’s lifetime. …

Apropos of this, David Brooks writes in today’s Times that our political problems are partly due to the fact that Americans are good enough followers; it’s easy to caricature this point, but there may be something to it. From his column:

“I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.”