Later, in 1992, he collaborated on the Frontline documentary “Saddam’s Killing Fields,” secretly returning to Iraq to investigate Saddam’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds.

Now, as the atrocities he documented are being trumpeted by the United States, Great Britain and others, Makiya has emerged as the voice of the democratic Iraqi opposition, determined to work with American military hard-liners to unseat Saddam and his Baath party while fighting cynical realists in the administration of President Bush who would just replace the recalcitrant dictator with a more pliant one. As the spokesman and theorist for the Iraqi National Congress, he battled to have democrats and independents — as opposed to just former military men, Islamists and members of political parties — included in the Iraqi opposition conference held in London this week.

Interestingly, he says the people who’ve helped his cause have been those most despised by American liberals — the Cheney-Perle-Wolfowitz clique in the White House. It’s the State Department and the CIA — often viewed as the locus of relative reason and responsibility in government — who have stood in his way, he says.

A longtime progressive, Makiya is pushing a plan for a post-Saddam Iraq so idealistic and audacious that opposing the war and thus standing against his dreamed-of reconstruction seems like a heartbreaking cop-out.

The West has a poor record of foisting democracies on countries without a civil infrastructure — in the absence of other institutions, elections can spur the ethnic demagoguery that has ravaged countries from Rwanda to Yugoslavia. So Makiya envisions a federal Iraq that will spend years solidifying protections for minorities before it holds elections, enshrining individual and group rights in the constitution. He imagines a demilitarized nation with vast oil wealth channeled toward education and development. He wants a democratic Iraq to be beacon of liberalism in the region, one that will spread freedom to Iran, Syria and beyond.

He’s the radical humanist as hawk.

Not surprisingly, Makiya’s willingness to ally himself with the Bush administration has earned him the enmity of former comrades on the left. In a vitriolic attack in the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram earlier this month, Edward Said, the famed literature professor and Middle East scholar, called Makiya “the intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has.”

“He is a man of vanity who has no compassion,” Said wrote, “no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no stable principles or values, he is typical of the cynical anti-Arab hawks … who dot the Bush administration like flies on a cake … Worst of all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people to more travail and more dislocation.”

But Makiya argues that those too mired in despair to seize the chance for Iraq’s liberation are the ones who have forfeited their principles and values. Joining his campaign requires a leap of faith — that regime change can be about more than American hegemony and Republican power politics — and many liberals are unwilling to make it. They might be right. But even if they are, their position means settling for a status quo whose horrors Makiya has shown us.

Makiya spoke to Salon from London, where he attended the Iraqi opposition conference.

You’ve been frustrated by the liberal assumption that the Defense Department is full of callous cowboys while people like Secretary of State Colin Powell represent rationality. Can you explain why?

It’s really based on practical experience over the last six months, seeing how the position on Iraq has evolved. In general the Department of State and the CIA are particularly slow in supporting any genuine democratic initiative. They are the ones who have spearheaded the very dominant role played by Islamists from Tehran at the conference that just finished in London. They’re behind the support the ex-Baathists have received.

There are deep philosophical differences undermining this. They [the State Department and CIA] have a very low level of faith in democracy as a practicable working idea in a country like Iraq. They have a deep faith in the importance of maintaining the status quo in the Middle East. They tend generally to be the ones still trying to prop up our Saudi Arabian relationship and deny the deep complicity of Saudi Arabia in the emergence of al-Qaida.

Supporting tyrannical authoritarian Arab regimes has been U.S. policy for a very long time. It’s failed most dramatically. The other policy wing in the American administration [represented by the Defense Department hawks] looks at American policy over the last 30 years and sees failure. Their policy begins with an impulse to approach the problem at its core. At the moment it sees those roots as best being approached through the issue of Iraq.

How would a democratic Iraq change the dynamics of the entire Middle Eeast?

There’s no doubt that a successful democratic experiment in Iraq will have a dramatic effect over a period time. It would support Palestinian reforms, it would support human rights organizations in neighboring Syria and Iran and weaken dictatorship. The United States doesn’t have to do a thing about it; it will just happen as a natural course. We already know the student movement in Iran is actively calling for democratic change in Iraq. They instinctively sense that a democratic Iraq will strengthen their position, and I think they’re right.

Large parts of the world have democratized. There’s been a domino effect in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Why not the Middle East?

But wouldn’t democracy in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt bring Islamic theocracies to power?

Certainly in Saudi Arabia at the moment Osama bin Laden might win a free election. Egypt is much more complicated. Militant Islam has been tested and defeated in Algeria and Iran. You can look at al-Qaida as the tail end of militant Islam.

In Iraq, we argue [in a report that came out of the conference] that the key way of thinking about democracy in Iraq is not on the basis of majority rule in the first place. We’d begin with protection of minority rights. The priority of the rule of law is crucial. That should last for a period of three years, a period when a priority is placed on culture and education. Once those institutions are set in place, then comes the national election. We’re going to build the state in such a way that it will never be possible to deny Kurds their Kurdishness again. Then we’ll have national elections.

Do you favor an American military government during that three-year interim period?

No, I don’t. We’ve been arguing this very strongly both to the administration and elsewhere. We don’t want the story of a new beginning in Iraq 10 years down the line to begin with an American occupation. We want the Americans to be there to protect our territorial integrity, but we need to put our house in order. An American occupation is wrong. I spoke to Condoleezza Rice about that, and she seemed to agree.

So who should form the interim government?

America should pay a lot more attention two to three months before the war to working with the opposition to form what is going to become the nucleus of a provisional government inside Iraq. That’s what’s missing, because a large number of people want to keep their options open, and when you start working with a leadership, you’re committed to whatever that leadership is about. I think it should be about democracy.

Make your choice of leadership over the lowest common denominator. I’ve not found the United States administration willing to do that. The primary driving force is this magic word “inclusiveness.” In the name of “inclusiveness” you include Islamists from Tehran, Baathists, and every Tom, Dick and Harry. The goal is being pushed to the extreme at the expense of the emergence of true leadership.

Did the London conference bring you any closer to the goal of creating a democratic leadership?

It’s an improvement over what existed before, but it falls short of what could have been. It was a good conference. There was a sense of unity in the opposition. It broke up some of the major groupings created by the CIA and State Department to block the emergence of a democratic leadership.

What groupings were those?

What used to be called the Group of Four — four parties that were singled out of the Iraqi National Congress, who were bribed out by the CIA and the State Department in March and April.

So new alliances were created at the conference?

We’re entering into a new phase. A leadership committee has emerged of some 65 people. Fifteen to 20 percent are from our group. Democrats and independents played a major role at this conference. Our document, “The Transition to Democracy in Iraq,” was the major document. It’s going to be adopted by some of the groups and its discourse will start to penetrate. We’re making plans to distribute thousands of copies inside Iraq itself.

Your vision of an egalitarian, demilitarized Iraq is one that might appeal specifically to liberals, and you’ve said that liberals have an obligation to make democratic change happen in Iraq. But don’t liberals also have an obligation to stand against this war if they fear it will unleash bloody chaos throughout the Middle East? Isn’t that a threat?

I think that’s wildly exaggerated. Of course if things go wrong there could be a mess, but Iraqis have to have a new beginning, and in order to have a new beginning in this part of the world, Iraq is going to have to go through something. There’s a major totalitarian dictatorship that’s been there for 30-odd years. Changes, let there be changes. The Middle East is a mess. Keeping that stable is not a desirable objective for any liberal or person interested in human welfare.

But since you say there’s a possibility that a war could create a mess, isn’t it rash to leap into it? Especially since there’s no reason to trust this administration to follow through on its promises?

Things are already a mess. The country’s already fragmented. Everything about Iraq today is unstable. If in a year or two the regime crumbles, true chaos will descend. We have a chance to do it right.

We have an obligation to make democratic change happen in Iraq. There’s going to be regime change. If these people are involved, the chances of it being done right would be infinitely greater.

The thing I fear most of all would be an 11th-hour coup which the United States opts to support. If there were a strong liberal agenda of support for democratic change in Iraq, the chance of that happening would be infinitely smaller. But where are the liberals? They’re denying that democratic change is likely to happen in the first place.

So you believe we should take Bush at his word when he talks about democracy in the Middle East?

Exactly. In politics, that’s always the best thing to do. Take the values upon which they stand and press them. Assume those values are as valid for other people as for yourselves and push George Bush to the wall, make him hold up to his promises. We would all be infinitely better off if that’s what liberals were doing instead of opposing the war.

It’s as though liberals can’t see what’s clearly about to unfold in front of their eyes. They’re blind because of past prejudices about individuals in power in the United States, and they’re letting those block their perception of the values upon which they stand.

You’re a champion of the human-rights case for regime change in Iraq. The obvious rejoinder to that is that there are many countries in the world with brutal, repressive dictators, and the United States can’t go after them all. What makes Iraq different?

First, Max van der Stoel, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for human rights, issued a definitive report saying that Iraq is the worst violator of human rights since World War II. Iraq’s government is not ordinarily nasty — it’s extraordinarily nasty and dangerous, especially to its own population.

Second, Saddam has a deep-seated obsession with developing weapons. It’s sort of like Hitler in the Final Solution — there’s an irrational streak to the whole thing. Here’s a regime on the verge of having a major war launched for its demise, and its still busy concealing these weapons of mass destruction. You can take this argument as far back as you like in the last 10 years. After the Gulf War, Saddam could have truly allowed U.N. inspectors to do their work, then waited five years and climbed back into international respectability and started all over again. He didn’t do that, and that tells you a lot.

What would you say to liberals who oppose the war?

Think this question through from the point of view of what people in Iraq have been through, not from the point of view of your agendas at home.

You do not want to be where you’re putting yourself today. In your deepest heart of hearts, you don’t want to be there. If you are there, it’s because you’re ignorant of what’s going on inside Iraq. But the very people who stand to suffer the most are asking you to do this, and you of all people should be behind it.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of  “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.

This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.

Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.

Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.

Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.

The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.

And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.

Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)

Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.

The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.

Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.

The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.

Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.

Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.

All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.

It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.

So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”

Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.

Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.

I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.

My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”

My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.

I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.

At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.

I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.

Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.

Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.

Further reading

Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade

Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker

A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems

Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California

Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer