Someone brought this up today and I had to go back and take a look at it again in light of the mountain of words written over the past weeks about Afghanistan and 9/11. It was a very famous quote back in the day and applied specifically to the Bush administration’s delusions of grandeur about their “Pax Americana.”
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It takes on a different cast in the Trump era, but it’s basically the same thing. They make their own reality and we’re just watching it unfold.
The word is that is was probably Karl Rove , although that has never been confirmed, and that does sound like his usual nonsense. Whatever this person’s intentions were, he or she weren’t wrong. They do make their own reality, empire or not. And the “reality based community” is left to grapple with what they’ve done.