Tobias Wolff

Celebrated novelist and memoirist. His latest short story collection, Our Story Begins, was published in August. Won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Barracks Thief (1984)

Last week I was roused from sleep by a strange dream - that my bearded, hairy-backed, happily married older brother Geoffrey, now 70 and up to his eyeballs in grandchildren, had decided to get a sex change. My mentioning this to anyone who knows him has unfailingly produced peals of laughter. All right - dreams are funny, when they're funny. But imagine waking every day to the dream that George W Bush is your president.

I simply can't, as Justice Scalia has advised, 'get over it'. As I grind my coffee to the morning newscast and the image of our confident president appears, the bile rises in the gorge, boiling over into tantrums and rants and declarations of despair that, even in the moment, strike me as clownish and pitiable, and are certainly viewed by my family in that light, until they join in.

No, I can't get over it, and neither can my friends, hard as we all try. When we meet for dinner we do our best to take up other subjects - books, gossip, movies, our children - but then, like the addicts we've become, we sneak back to the drug of outrage, shooting up the latest barefaced lie and squalid revelation, not forgetting to list yet again the national and global catastrophes brought about by the incompetence, hypocrisy, muddleheadedness, venality, truculence, mendacity, callousness, zealotry, machismo, lawlessness, cynicism, wishful thinking, and occasional downright evil of the administration of George W Bush. Our economy is in freefall, our public school system a disgrace, our military exhausted, the wounded and traumatised dying of neglect, yea, the very earth groaning for relief - and he's optimistic! Yessiree! Looking forward to it! Leaning toward us over the podium with that exasperated little squint and that impatient, dentist-drill voice, utterly at a loss as to how he got saddled with a nation of such gloomy Guses and crybabies.

Eddying around our own indignation again and again, as if caught in some Bermuda Triangle of complaint, we are unable not to remind each other of the fatal character of George Bush's incomprehension, the thousands upon thousands who have died by his blithe actions and inactions, and his inability to understand at any level - political, moral, emotional - the terrible damage he has done, this man whose idea of sharing in the grief of parents who've lost a son or daughter in Iraq is to give up playing golf! If he really did.

There - I've stepped in the trap again. I can't help it. And for many of us that has been a defining condition of life in George W Bush's reign, this unanswerable need to register anew and aloud our shock and dismay, indeed our disbelief, at finding him at the wheel as we wake each morning.

Was it ever so? Nixon, especially in his last months, inspired fits of revulsion, but never incredulity that he had achieved the office in the first place. Same with Johnson. They were at least very smart, and deeply experienced.

So how did George W Bush do it? On the face of it, such a man getting himself elected President of the United States would seem an impossibility - this party boy, this tangle-tongued, failed businessman who always managed to save his own bacon while his investors went under, this tough-talking supporter of the Vietnam war who hid out in the Texas Air National Guard when his turn came to serve. Karl Rove's strategic exploitation of social divisions and resentments deserves some of the credit. The Supreme Court, to be sure - Bush vs Gore. Chicanery at the polls and a lot of dumb luck, most notably in the form of 3,000 old folks flummoxed by a confusing ballot. All this and more. But there had to be something else, a meta-narrative if you will, that established him in the hearts of the large minority who voted for him in 2000 and the decisive majority who returned him to power in 2004. And what else could that have been, but what it always is with such empty shirts? Nostalgia.

In short, he presented himself as a man of the past - that star-spangled past when it only took one ranger to quell a riot, and you drove big cars without getting sneered at by sissies on bicycles, and you could make a few million without having to divvy it up with the lazy pathetnoids next door; when neighbours talked over the fence and could depend on each other, and the rivers ran straight and clear and teeming with trout, and you could dredge them for gold without the government breathing down your neck, and the trees were really big and you could chop them down, and you won wars, and men wore hats to work and meant what they said, and nobody was gay, and the queers all lived in New York, and you could say under God and have a Christmas tree on the town green without people in turbans and sidelocks getting up your nose about it.

That was the America we think we grew up in, and we want it back, and George W Bush, with his down-home voice, and gunslinger swagger, and no-nonsense contempt for the complications of a modern society, gave clear promise of a right of return to that good and simple past. That was his appeal, in both senses of the word. And in this one thing, alas, he was sincere.

He wants the fictional past to become the actual present.

This might be risible if he weren't President. But he is, and it isn't, because he has resolutely declined to prepare for any future he doesn't approve of, say the one where his war perversely ignores the script, and 4,000 young Americans get killed, and 40,000 more come home with wounds to their bodies, and still more thousands return with wounds to their minds and souls that may never heal, and find themselves, for lack of any foresight at all, in understaffed, rat-infested hospitals and psych wards, while the people we claimed to be saving are killed and crippled in even greater numbers - numbers unknown, because it has been our stated policy not to count them. George W Bush wouldn't countenance that future. Or the future where we start running out of oil. Or the future where glaciers disappear and McMurdo Bay starts looking like a good bet for a Club Med. Or the future where our economy begins to melt into foreign hands. Or the future where foreign hands begin to refuse our economy.

We have been in dire need of someone who could adapt to, even, within reason, anticipate manifestly changing conditions in this country and the world at large. But we have had George W Bush, who views change as illicit, even as betrayal, and will not compound the betrayal by any change in himself. And under his unmoving hand you can feel the country straining to move forward, like some great engine shrieking toward the breaking point as the driver presses the pedal to the floor but refuses to shift from neutral into gear.

Of course he could not have staged this astonishing performance without support. I'm not speaking of Rove, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Bremer, Tenet, 'Scooter' (!) Libby, David Addington and John Yoo and the rest of that scabrous crowd of armchair warriors, perjurers, torturers, and fools. No, they didn't put him in office; the American people did. 'My fellow Americans' - to use the term by which every lying speech is prefaced. And the fact of his election, as much as the incessant abrasion of George W Bush's misgovernment, oppresses me with embarrassment and, I confess, a certain despair for our future.

Yes, embarrassment - because his electors really are, after all, my fellow Americans, and I have always wanted to believe in their basic good sense, as I want them to believe in mine. That trust is in fact the very ground of a democratic society. Yet enough of my fellow Americans played the sucker to give this man two terms as President. Amazing! In truth, you never saw such a transparently smug, happily ignorant, unread, unthinking candidate for high office, let alone this office. Surely his unsuitability was plain to everyone. It should have been - he had a nearly unbroken record of personal unreliability and professional incompetence going into the first election, and by the second his record was perfect. There was simply no good argument to be made for his election, and every good argument to be made against his re-election. What did he have to offer, after all, beyond nostalgia? The bribe of lower taxes, already proven to be a sham for all but the richest few, and the continued sacrifice of our young people and our dwindling resources in a deceptively-undertaken and stupidly-executed war. By no reasonable standard could my fellow Americans, most of them anyway, see him as representing their interests. But they voted for him anyway. Why? Because Jesus is his 'favourite philosopher'. Because they felt more comfortable with him than with either of the serious, substantial men who opposed him. Because they'd rather have a beer with him!

As the old saying has it, the turkeys voted for Thanksgiving.

And though it is snobbish of me to say so, elitist and undemocratic, I will say that the embarrassment I've been feeling for the last seven years proceeds exactly from that sense of my fellow Americans cheerfully volunteering to be plucked, gutted, bled and hung upside down. It has made me embarrassed, as of some public foolishness by one's family, and it has made me vindictive. When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W Bush. And - this is really mean, I know, really unfair and unreasonable and inhumane, and I scold myself for this, believe me, but - when a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right! And I have friends in Texas. That's some of what the last seven years have done to this writer.

Well, boo hoo, what did I expect? Didn't Jesus, and Chuang Tzu, and Shakespeare, and Mark Twain, and my other favourite philosophers all warn me about politics and politicians? Aren't I a little old for all this gnashing of teeth? I am, I am, and I fear I have years more of it ahead of me, because even now the mud is flying, and the fear machine is humming, and we're on our way back to the past.

Edmund White

Novelist, short story-writer and critic, best-known for his autobiographical novels, which include A Boy's Own Story (1982). Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

I moved back to the States from France 10 years ago and soon after my repatriation (after 16 years in Paris) Bush was elected. Although I am perhaps the least political person I know (the first time I voted in my long life was against Bush in the last presidential election), nevertheless a bad president has a depressing effect on the entire culture, no matter how strenuously one ignores him. As a gay man who has always felt that society at large despises me and that I'd be considered a criminal by most of my fellow citizens, I've never wanted to participate in electoral politics - or politics of any sort. I remember that during the Watergate trials I dismissed the whole brouhaha as 'their scandal'.

But I had known two moments of political euphoria - Mitterrand's election and Blair's. I was in Paris for the first with French friends who were delirious, and for gays there were immediate benefits. Mitterrand acknowledged that the gay vote had helped him and he dissolved that part of the police force that was supposed to run after gays having sex in the parks at night. I was at a book party that Martin Amis and his wife were giving for me the night Blair was elected, and again I felt the exultation and got caught up in it. Unfortunately, both men turned out to be corrupt or seriously misguided.

With Bush it was a different matter. Here was this grinning, supercilious frat boy who'd adopted a fake Texas accent (his family is from Maine), who'd managed to be 'born again' in order to attract the votes of the Christian Right, who'd been responsible for more public executions of criminals than any official in recent memory, who denied global warming, who'd evaded military service but was soon enough sending thousands of American soldiers to their deaths. Here was an oaf who wanted to give the president of Germany back rubs - which she angrily rejected - and who surrounded himself with the most blatant emblems of corporate greed in American history. During Bush's watch in the last eight years there have been four major disasters - 9/11, Iraq, Katrina and the Wall Street crash - and Bush has responded slothfully to each one. He started the war, he bungled the post-hurricane relief effort, and the deregulation that the Republicans fought so long and hard for has produced the crash.

Perhaps the most depressing moment in the last eight years was Bush's re-election. As a teacher, I've long lamented the dumbing down of America; now I was tempted to see our educational failure as a plot to keep the electorate stupid and gullible. In America, a tiny elite receives a rigorous education and the rest of the population is kept in darkest ignorance, just as a small percentage of our youngsters constitute Olympic champion athletes and the rest of the population is grotesquely obese: a strange idea of democracy. I was prepared to believe that Dubya's first election had been a mistake or a cheat, but the idea that the voters could re-elect him was too grim to contemplate.

As a writer, I found the whole climate under Bush particularly disheartening. Funding for the arts and humanities was at an all-time low. Whereas small bookshops have been saved in France by the Jack Lang law, which forbids discounting of books, in America independent bookstores (including the 50 or so gay ones) were wiped out by the big chains, which are now beginning to go under as well, driven out by Amazon. With our passion for deregulation and the freedom of the market, we would never defend the rights of consumers to have community bookstores (which in America are often community cultural centres) alive and well on every corner.

After 9/11 the press was at its weakest and least vocal. I'd always been used to the liberal papers in America examining every governmental excess or infringement with a magnifying glass; now no one seemed to be looking. Most people were getting their news online and most newspapers were cutting back or closing down - and more and more of them belonged to Rupert Murdoch. Similarly, all the small independent publishers were being bought up by conglomerates, many of them in no way previously connected to the book industry. More and more titles were being published but in smaller and smaller runs; it seemed that there were no longer any common talking points among Americans.

They lived isolated in their suburban houses, looking at hundreds of cable channels, driving through streets empty of pedestrians; America had become the saddest place on earth. The very rich had become even richer and everyone else was considerably poorer. Conveniently for the Republicans, the last great taboo in America is class. No one is allowed to mention it, not even novelists. Whereas British novelists are always beavering away defining ever more minute class differences, American writers can get a sense of contrast only by looking at the Third World. As a judge two years ago for the Granta top 20 American writers under 35 contest, the trend I most noticed is what I'd call the Peace Corps novel. Everyone is writing about India and South America and the Philippines and Vietnam - no one is writing about the big city or rural poor in America.

I have a good friend who is a descendent of President Pierce, who was against abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War. Until now he's always been considered the worst president (there are two or three other candidates). My friend is grateful to Bush for knocking out all the competition...