Would Jeb Be Like....?

Politico has an interesting piece speculating about how the Crown Prince's neo-conservatism might further the development of the emergent and illiberal national security state in the USA.  A statist system dependent more on the personality and power of the executive than the traditional constitutional system of checks and balances, and due process. The real question, implied but not directly asked by the article is whether another neoconservative president (another Bush) would essentially overturn the constitutional order, and effectively replace it with an authoritarian regime that is a constitutional republic in name only.  The source for this musing is the recent PR dump by the Bushistas of carefully selected internal emails from JEB!'s Florida governorship.  

What the article is really asking, without daring to do so exoterically, is whether Leo Strauss' reductio ad Hitlerum applies to Obama's continuation of Bush II's national security policies. Do they function as a sort of Bruening-von Papen-von Schleicher Article 48 prelude to a final neocon gleichschaltung of power in the figure of a Bush III neocon man-god, philosopher king? I guess we would find out after the dirty bomb goes off, post 21 January 2017.

With or without such an application of Godwin's Law, the Bushes are nonetheless sending an unambiguous message for anyone informed enough to look closely.  The recent email release, along with the Crown Prince's deliberate, and high profile dubious business activities over the last year portray a legacy scion with an imperial mindset bent on obtaining power willfully, and on his own terms.

Here is the Politico intro:

"An executive branch led by an insular, almost brooding [highly debatable] intellect  … running a tightly controlled, top-down policy machine with an aversion for leaks … and a mistrust—even disdain—for the legislative branch.

The Obama White House? Perhaps—but as fresh scrutiny of tens of thousands of his emails is starting to show, it could just as easily describe one of the current president’s would-be successors, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

In his two terms in Tallahassee, the Republican governor pushed the boundaries of executive power. He unilaterally restructured the state’s affirmative action program through an executive order, rankling the state’s black community. He used his line-item veto pen liberally, axing hundreds of millions of dollars in hometown projects and upsetting even the state’s Republican Senate to the point that it successfully sued him on a technical point." Read more.