The Bush era has been completely erased from the American psyche

Every so often on this subreddit, someone serves up a fresh screenshot of someone praising Dubya Bush or his cabinet members. Usually, they are a neoliberal hagiographically comparing Professional Bush to Evil Trump in illustrating how the Republican Party has taken a turn for the worse. Then we like to point out that Bush has so much blood on his hands, et cetera et cetera. I'm not here to open up the typical dunking-on-neoliberals thread. Not that I am too good for that.

I want to discuss the phenomenon behind these comparisons. Nobody remembers Bush, nobody cares anymore. Not liberals, not conservatives. And this is so ridiculous it deserves to be discussed, for the post-9/11 period was the most significant in American history since Vietnam. But the president at the helm of that has lost all relevance. Though he is the same age as Trump, he might as well be a ghost. Liberals can reimagine him because they carry no anger towards him and have been worn down by Trump, and conservatives no longer think of him as their old leader, but as the leader of a completely different party.

Let's start with Liberals. It's obvious that Trump has worn liberals down and made them beg for an enemy who plays by the rules. The period before 2016 now comprises the Old World of politics. Because Bush belongs firmly in this old world, he has lost all relevancy and all anger that gets associated with a relevant enemy.

I ran into a high school enemy at the gym recently. I felt no enmity, but rather simple fondness for him and the the time period he represented. He laughed and said how good it was to see me. On the way home I reflected on how strange that was: it's not like we ever made up during high school. I really was happy to see him. The truth was, that world was so distant from us that it was impossible to feel anything besides nostalgic warmth.

Similarly, Liberals cannot find any anger towards Bush anymore, the world is too different now. Thus he is simply a reminder of the old world of ordered politics. He becomes not an enemy, not a war criminal, but rather a blissful memento. He has not been an enemy for a long time

On the other side of the aisle, Bush has lost all relevancy to conservatives. They don't care one bit about Bush, anything he did, or who he was. First, the party was shocked by Trump's 2016 victory in the primaries, then Trump's victory in the general elections. Conservatives were split along old (Bush) versus new (Trump) lines and free to throw barbs at each other, just as any incumbent party is bound to bicker.

My uncle is a desert storm veteran who became disabled in combat. He's a family man and very Trump-conservative. In 2018, my grandfather died and we all went to his hometown in the Deep South for his funeral. Many of us stayed in the same Airbnb, and after the funeral the liquor came out. The whole night, Bush kept creeping into the conversation. Rather, my uncle kept dragging him in. He swore Bush was behind 9/11. Nobody stood against him, partially because it is uncouth to deny a conspiracy theory when alcohol is involved, and partially because nobody wanted to get in his way. His eyes were rabid. He hated Dubya Bush. He swore up and down that the man was evil, bloodthirsty and cruel.

This faction of conservatives were the last Americans to care about Bush. He was soon truly gone from their memory too. Mike Pence certifying the 2020 results gave Trump the excuse to excise that part of Republican Party.

At the same time, a new crazy wind took over. The Great Reset. George Floyd, Vaccines, Masks, insane conspiracies full of lizards, Biden inflation, and a new endless stream of topics: the culture war.

I have seen my uncle twice recently. Both times I remembered clearly how he hated Bush so strongly that night at my Grandpas funeral, but he didn’t say a word. He only cared about biological men potentially wrestling in his girls' high school league and getting into their bathrooms. He urged me at every turn to leave California and go live with him in Utah. But nobody remembers Bush.