Compare Personas

George W. Bush

Linear, uni-directional, non-deterministic, providentially read. Bush's political imagination is dominated by decision points — discrete moments at which the executive must choose, with consequences that propagate forward irreversibly. The memoir is literally organised around fourteen such moments.

George W. Bush

Substantival, three-dimensional, local, geopolitically structured. Bush's spatial imagination was reshaped on 11 September 2001 by the recognition that the United States was no longer protected by oceans in the way mid-century planners had assumed.

George W. Bush

Conventional: substantival, conserved, three-dimensional, local. The Bush economic policy combined tax cuts, the response to the 2001 recession, and — in his last six months — the largest emergency intervention in American financial markets since the 1930s.

George W. Bush

Single embodied person, plural among others, intensely active under God. Personal metaphysical agency: an evangelical theism that informed both his self-discipline (the sobriety dated from his thirty-ninth year) and his sense of national mission.

George W. Bush

Conventional: finite, substantival, conserved, irreversible. Energy policy was dominated by Middle Eastern oil-supply politics and, late in the presidency, the first serious federal investment in alternative-energy research at scale.

George W. Bush

Conserved at both scales. The decisions on enhanced interrogation, the NSA collection programs, and the post-presidential debate over what was and was not released form a sustained question about how much of the public informational record the executive may legitimately withhold.