In the seven months running up to the presidential elections on Sept. 7, the burly old general Mubarak suppressed popular demonstrations by the Kifayah (“Enough!”) reform movement, which demanded an end to emergency powers that the government uses to suppress civil liberties. He also ordered the police to bust up protests by the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned hundreds of its members and leaders. By May 2005, he had thrown 754 members in prison for participating in peaceful protests. He excluded the party, among the more popular in the country, from running for office.

Mubarak tossed Ayman Nour, the popular leader of a major new recognized political party, al-Ghad (“Tomorrow”) into prison for 45 days on trumped-up charges. In part because of the intervention of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he released Nour but kept the indictment hanging over Nour’s head. Al-Ghad is devoted to secularism, free markets and improving the lot of the poor, according to its platform. Mubarak finally relented and allowed other candidates to run against him in the presidential elections, but only those from parties approved by his own party. His landslide victory in a lackluster election that allowed only 18 days for campaigning was produced by less than a quarter of the eligible voters.

The bottom line: The outcome of the Sept. 7 elections was never in doubt, a fact recognized by Kifayah, which called for a boycott. The boycott received far more support than did Nour.

How did the Bush administration reply to this litany of authoritarian actions and sad parodies of “democracy”? Bush called Mubarak to congratulate him on his “victory”! Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan was trotted out to say, “This election represents an important step toward holding fully free and fair competitive multiparty elections, and both supporters and opponents of the government have told us that it has occasioned a vigorous national debate in Egypt on important issues.” Contrast these reactions to the Bush administration’s dismissal of Iran’s June presidential election as “illegitimate.” In Iran, the ideological difference among the candidates was if anything greater than among the Egyptian candidates. The turnout was more than twice what it was in Egypt, and the president won by a smaller margin. It is true that the Iranian elections were marred by dirty tricks, exclusion of liberal reformists from running, and very possibly fraud. But it is not entirely clear that the Egyptian elections, marred by voting abuses, were any better. To most people in the world, Bush’s selective outrage about elections is so egregiously hypocritical that it appears he is intentionally flaunting it.

Western powers have been pushing Egypt on the issue of democracy for centuries, but “democracy” has usually been a cover for Western dominance. In response, Egyptian elites have insisted on doing things their own way. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the country in 1798 on the pretext of “liberating” it from tyranny. (Egypt was at that time a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.) Bonaparte set up a National Assembly of Egyptian clerics, though he made the important decisions, including the imposition of crushing tax increases. The ungrateful Egyptians revolted against the French several times and intrigued with the British and the Ottoman sultan to get them out of the country, with success coming in 1801.

In 1866 the Ottoman viceroy of the time instituted a harmless national assembly, which he appointed. But in the late 1870s the delegates began agitating for genuine elections and parliamentary control over the budget, and they succeeded in forcing relatively open elections for the National Assembly in 1881. The British and French, afraid that a sovereign parliament might default on the massive high-interest loans that the modernizing viceroys had contracted for, agitated against the new order. The British also coveted Egypt for its lucrative cotton production and for the Suez Canal, which from its opening in 1869 became the primary means for Great Britain to access its colonial Indian possessions.

In 1882 the British invaded to overthrow the parliamentary reform movement, and the Europeans ruled the country directly until 1922, careful to ensure that the London bondholders got paid by the sweat of Egyptian peasant labor. Needless to say, they did not allow anything like genuine elections during those decades. Present-day complaints by Western intellectuals that the Middle East has resisted democracy are the height of hypocrisy, given how many times Western powers intervened to stamp out any incipient signs of parliamentary sovereignty that might challenge European economic and political dominance.

After experiments with constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary life mainly dominated by the big landlord class from the 1920s on, Egypt underwent a military coup in 1952. The military-dominated republic — which sent the playboy King Farouk into exile, challenged continued British hegemony over the country, and pursued land reform and socialist industrialization — is with us to this day. The rural middle class created by the land reforms has been a backbone of the state. Hosni Mubarak is an air force general trained in Moscow when Egypt was allied with the old Soviet Union. Despite the camouflage of business suits and the window-dressing of a national Parliament, Egypt remains a military dictatorship 53 years after Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser and other young officers overthrew the corrupt big landlords of the old Wafd Party.

At some 77 million, Egypt is the most populous Arab country, making up an estimated third of the Arab world. It was the most formidable of the military enemies that Israel faced, and in both the Suez War of 1956 and the October War of 1973 its military acquitted itself better than its enemies had expected. In 1978 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat concluded the Camp David peace accords with Israel and the United States. Israel thus achieved the neutralization of its most important Arab antagonist. In return, Egypt got back all the territory Israel had conquered from it in the Sinai in 1967 and received a pledge of $2 billion in aid every year from the United States. Half of that aid was military, but had to be spent on American weaponry. Even the half dedicated to civilian purposes had to employ American companies, contractors and materiel.

The aid reinforced the Egyptian regime but did not help economic development. The Egyptian economy has for the most part stagnated in the face of high population growth and the “socialist hangover” of high tariffs and bloated state-owned companies. Sadat paid for the new alliance with the U.S. and Israel with his life, when the radical al-Jihad al-Islami, with which Ayman al-Zawahiri was involved, and the Gamaa Islamiyah of the blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, arranged for his assassination.

Beginning in the 1970s, Sadat had allowed carefully controlled parliamentary elections. His own National Democratic Party was founded in 1978 and has dominated Parliament ever since. The lower house, or People’s Assembly, has 454 seats. (The upper house is an advisory body.) In the 2000 parliamentary elections, the NDP garnered 388 seats in the People’s Assembly. The leftist Tagammu Party got six seats, the New Wafd Party of the secular-leaning middle class received seven seats, the Nasserists (Arab nationalists and socialists) received three. Some 37 seats went to independents. Another 10 were appointed by the president. No one believes that the NDP is so popular that it would naturally receive 85 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. It is not, however, impossible that it would receive a majority even in a fair election. In one recent opinion poll, 64 percent of Egyptians said that they were satisfied with their government. The NDP is a “goat barrel” (the rural equivalent of a pork barrel) party, doling out services and resources to its constituents in rural areas and among some urban groups.

The Egyptian system, like the French, has both a president and a prime minister. But Parliament is far less powerful in Egypt. In the old days it nominated the president, on whom a national referendum was held. He did not have to run against an opponent, and it was not clear how you could lose in the referendum if you were the only candidate. Hosni Mubarak won four six-year terms this way. As democracy, the system was largely a façade, though parliamentary deputies did often in some way represent their districts.

In May of this year, a national referendum approved a constitutional amendment that set up presidential elections as an actual election, with more than one candidate allowed. Only parties certified by Parliament, however, could field presidential candidates. Parliament in turn was massively dominated by the NDP of Hosni Mubarak. He warned last March, “If we open the door completely before the people, there will be chaos.” So the dominant party got to decide against whom it would run its candidate. This way of proceeding is not so different from that in Iran, where the dominant clerics vet presidential candidates.

Egypt and Iran are undemocratic in ideologically opposite ways. In Iran, the clerics exclude secular candidates from running for president. In Egypt, the NDP forbids the Muslim Brotherhood to run candidates, not only for the presidency but for any political office. Egyptian law makes it illegal for a political party to be based on religion, just as Iranian law outlaws secular parties.

Mubarak agreed to run against other candidates for a number of reasons. He faces a restive Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, that continually detracts from his legitimacy. He often deals with the Brotherhood by simply rounding up the more vocal leaders and jailing them for a while. Winning a real election would counter the Brotherhood’s charges that he is little more than a (secular humanist) military dictator and American puppet. The Egyptian middle classes, many of them highly educated and with entrepreneurial ambitions, chafe at the government’s heavy-handed interference in the economy (mostly for protectionist purposes), which they believe limits their opportunities. They and other groups have formed the Kifayah (“Enough!”) movement, which has held protests against the regime.

The new middle class is represented by the New Wafd Party and by its new competitor, the Tomorrow (al-Ghad) Party. The government recognized al-Ghad in October 2004; many observers believed it did so to weaken the Wafd and to split the urban middle-class vote. Ayman Nour, a cheeky activist lawyer who leads the al-Ghad, uses modern campaigning techniques and gives blunt speeches about Mubarak that would never have been tolerated in the 1980s. He said of the presidential election, “It will be neither free nor fair.” As it is, Nour was imprisoned for a couple of months in the winter of 2005, but was let go and allowed to run for president because of the resulting outcry in Egypt and abroad. He won 8 percent of the vote. American pressure is also no doubt behind Mubarak’s new openness to pluralism, but for the moment, he has finessed Washington with merely cosmetic changes.

Critics have long suspected Mubarak of planning to install his son, Gamal, in the presidency after him. Sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim once quipped that the republican dictators of the Middle East, most of whom were grooming sons to succeed them, had invented a new form of government, “monarpublicanism,” which has the dynastic aspect of a monarchy and the outer trappings of a civil republic. Mubarak, thin-skinned about his family and his son’s ambitions, tossed Ibrahim into prison in 2000, sentencing him to seven years, but released him early in the face of international pressure.

The president’s touchy overreaction demonstrates pretty clearly that Ibrahim was perfectly correct about the plan. At the very least, it seems clear that Mubarak intends on perpetuating into the far future the dominance of the military and the National Democratic Party, which, like most other such authoritarian organizations, contains three lies in its name, being neither truly national, nor in any sense democratic, nor even really a party as opposed to a set of Mubarak cronies.

The United States has only limited leverage with Egypt. It supposedly gives the country about $2 billion a year in aid, but the military half of that sum is really just a subsidy to the U.S. weapons industry, since it has to be spent on U.S. arms. A lot of the civilian half of the sum also makes its way back to the United States. The regime likes getting the money and arms but knows that they are a bribe to keep Egypt at peace with Israel, and that they are therefore unlikely to be withdrawn, lest the large and important Arab state of Egypt become unstable or begin to play the spoiler. The United States does have the ability to pressure the Mubarak government behind the scenes, which is the only tactic that has much hope of success. After so many decades under direct or indirect British rule, Egyptians bristle at being ordered about by Western powers like so many waiters in a kebab restaurant and would stubbornly dig in their heels in the face of direct pressure. The Egyptian public would suddenly rally around the Mubarak regime if it looked as though it were being targeted by neo-imperialists.

In any case, the U.S. government appears to be ambivalent about pushing Egypt too abruptly toward true democracy. The career State Department Foreign Service officers generally fear that such a move would bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Such fears may be overdrawn, but in Washington only the more reckless neocons want to take such a risk. Given how badly their gamble in Iraq went awry, they have lost much of their influence, in any case.

Egypt watchers may as well take a nap for a while, since Mubarak is unlikely to permit much change anytime soon, Bush or no Bush. A people who figured out how to get rid of Napoleon Bonaparte within a year is hardly flummoxed by a mere Texas poseur. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal will be so kind as to wake us up when spring comes.

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