Daivd Ignatius takes President Bush to task for undue optimism and praises his successor for refreshing pessimism. But he plays so fast and loose with the facts that the force of his underlying message (that a healthy dose of humility and skepticism about government is a good thing) is lost.

In his indictment of George Bush he declares:

Bush’s great mistakes have been those of an optimist who believed in social engineering on a global scale. He rolled into Iraq convinced that this traditional tribal society could be remade in a Western image of progress. When he talked of democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, there was a sense of inevitability — that democracy and freedom are immutable historical forces rather than the product of frail and imperfect human decisions.

Well, Iraq seems to be turning out rather well. Isn’t the better and more accurate point that Bush underestimated the difficulty of the task of liberating Iraq — which nevertheless was achieved? Or perhaps, Ignatius would have been better off raising the Bush administration’s unrealistic and sweeping domestic agenda items (e.g. social security reform) as examples of undue optimism. But that’s not a desirable critique for one cheering an even more ambitious domestic agenda from the Obama administration.

As for the President-elect, Ignatius praises his grumpiness:

With the inauguration of Barack Obama, the moment has arrived for what I want to call the “progressive pessimists.” This new worldview would marry the liberal desire to make life better with a realist’s appreciation of the limits of political and military power. This is a gloomier progressivism than President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 admonition to “pay any price, bear any burden.” We’ve tried that.

We’ll have to wait for Obama’s own inaugural address to see just where his compass is pointed. But there was a notable absence of heaven-on-earth rhetoric in his speech last Thursday at George Mason University. Obama painted a bleak picture of double-digit unemployment and a lost generation of workers. With the inauguration of Barack Obama, the moment has arrived for what I want to call the “progressive pessimists.” This new worldview would marry the liberal desire to make life better with a realist’s appreciation of the limits of political and military power. This is a gloomier progressivism than President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 admonition to “pay any price, bear any burden.” We’ve tried that.

We’ll have to wait for Obama’s own inaugural address to see just where his compass is pointed. But there was a notable absence of heaven-on-earth rhetoric in his speech last Thursday at George Mason University. Obama painted a bleak picture of double-digit unemployment and a lost generation of workers.

Well, as I’ve noted before, that demeanor isn’t necessarily a good thing when the President is trying to cajole the country out of a recession. But it is also misleading, in that it suggests that the President-elect’s “pessimism” tempers his ambition. But we know from his sweeping health care and stimulus plans that nothing could be further from the truth. Ignatius goes on to praise, deservedly so I think, the President-elect’s cautious conservatism on anti-terror measures and then offers this:

The patron saint of progressive pessimism is George Orwell, who was at once a passionate social democrat and a political reactionary. He was as suspicious of the do-gooder impulse of the left as he was of the imperialist jingoism of the right. In his famous novels “1984” and “Animal Farm,” Orwell conveyed his deep skepticism about the utopian impulse and the way it could be manipulated by authoritarian leaders. He was torn all his life between a progressive’s passion for the downtrodden and a pessimist’s recognition of how this humanitarian impulse could be misused.

Oh, that it were true — that the country had stumbled on to a 21st century Orwell! But alas, the new administration is filled with “utopian impulses” on the environment, health care and the like.

Ignatius misses one of the lessons of FDR and other post-WWII presidents, one that ambitious liberals would rather ignore. Huge, sweeping domestic agenda items are risky things –hard to pass, filled with unintended consequences and ultimately threatening to individual liberty. We could use not more grouchiness, but more intellectual skepticism about the wisdom of these sorts of undertakings. Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised, but for now there’s every reason to believe the lessons of Orwell will have to be painfully relearned once again.