So, for all of the bitching about the military-industrial complex, and the surveillance state, you can thank Dubya and pals for that as he was the one that flung the doors wide open on all of this, with everybody else riding in on his authoritarian coattails. Obama, Trump, and Biden are mere amateurs compared to what his administration pulled.
Lyndon B. Johnson would like to speak with you. Nobody likes having their life's work stolen by somebody else later on.
Now back to whether George W. Bush was a terrible president. Eh, in my opinion, he's radically substandard, however, he's not egregiously terrible. It'll be hard to get a 100% accurate evaluation of the guy's presidency until at least the 2040s once an entirely new generation removed from anything related to the early 2000s becomes conscious. All the millennials and older Zoomers are still heavily influenced by the era's political culture so their biases will show up no matter how impartial they may try to be. Think about the boomers' instilled hatred of Nixon and love of LBJ that took until quite recently to be reevaluated showing that they were both run-of-the-mill politicians of their time who did non-uniquely crappy things for their parties at the expense of others.
The big "shift" in "their" America will be forever linked to those figures no matter how much new information or dissertations point out the seedlings of the problems that bloomed during the '60s and '70s were probably planted decades ago. They're just the new guys tasked with holding the water can over the spot it was buried in. Same with Bush and Obama.
Iraq, the Patriot Act, and No Child Left Behind are all horrible things that will forever be a blight on Bush Jr.'s 12-year run, but they were all things that were most likely gonna happen either way regardless of whether Dubya entered politics.
Al Gore or whatever Rhino takes Bush's place would have invaded Afghanistan and most likely another bordering country still based on the fear of general terrorism which was the big boogie man in D.C. for years. People forget how fearful America was of any Islamic group being allowed to operate and potentially plan strikes on the homeland. If it wasn't Iraqi WMDs, a new group in Yemen, or Pakistan for harboring Bin Laden. Any number of things could have set the twitchy military people off who were itching to continue the fight against the Jihad. The "Nation Rebuilding" aim was a goal in almost every foreign campaign after WWI so we would still stay to try and make a functioning government only to later find out this isn't like a European or Asian nation. The goat herders obey nobody besides their clans. I guess if things went perfectly we could have been out of there in 2012, still a decades-long quagmire though. Puppet government left behind 100% collapses after withdrawal.
The CIA as we all know, has been spying on people daily as far back as the 50s and the monolith that is their department only grew tenfold in the following years. The Patriot Act is not new, just the result of a tragedy not being put to waste. Project ECHELON was already able to intercept satellite transmissions and most internet traffic since the 90s. A new politician in the 2000s likely signs the same measures we saw in 2001 just spaced out in smaller portions. Snowden still has a bunch of shit to leak. The Feds grow bigger and more advanced as they adopt emerging technology. The reasons for clamping down so hard may be due to different contrived reasons like online radicals or mass shooters. Misinformation might also be put into play far earlier if the "Terrorism" alarm isn't there to be exhausted.
Finally, we have the schooling system that already had the focus on funding and learning based on standardized testing scores since 1983 with the "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" report. That shit was so entrenched along with despised by most educators that the newly released Simpsons parodied it during a 1992 episode, seeing it as the thing which decided a person's life. Since bureaucratic policies are based on contextless statistics, this number-crunching obsession still sees schools all over the country sacrifice real learning for knowledge parroting so that they get large enough grants to keep funding the damn overcrowded buildings. Reforms against it will take a snail's pace to gain enough momentum to be enacted.
TL;DR:
Bush was a middling President whose cabinet made retarded decisions and policies which were not all that surprising in hindsight given the general trends at the time. He could have done better, but that would only make a 5% better reality that could easily still slip into the same societal bog we find ourselves in today. He'd have to kill off 99.9% of the Senate and politicians in 2000 to make a real change in the direction the United States took.
