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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Category Archives: Politics

The Man Who Most Believed in Himself

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Politics

≈ Comments Off on The Man Who Most Believed in Himself

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Clinton Rossiter, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fred I. Greenstein, Grover Cleveland, Richard Neustadt, Theodore Roosevelt, William E. Leuchtenburg, Woodrow Wilson

“[Franklin] Roosevelt faced formidable challenges as president, but he never doubted that he would cope with them, for he believed that he belonged in the White House. He had sat on Grover Cleveland’s knee, cast his first vote for Uncle Teddy, and seen Woodrow Wilson at close range; but the office seemed peculiarly his almost as a birthright. As Richard Neustadt has observed: ‘Roosevelt, almost alone among our Presidents, had no conception of the office to live up to; he was it. His image of the office was himself-in-office.’ He loved the majesty of the position, relished its powers, and rejoiced in the opportunity it offered for achievement. ‘The essence of Roosevelt’s Presidency,’ Clinton Rossiter has written, ‘was his airy eagerness to meet the age head on. Thanks to his flair for drama, he acted as if never in all history had there been times like our own.’

A Washington reporter noted in 1933: ‘No signs of care are visible to his main visitors or at the press conferences. He is amiable, urbane and apparently untroubled. He appears to have a singularly fortunate faculty for not becoming flustered. Those who talk with him informally in the evenings report that he busies himself with his stamp collection, discussing in an illuminating fashion the affairs of state while he waves his shears in the air.’ Even after Roosevelt had gone through the trials of two terms of office, Time reported: ‘He has one priceless attribute: a knack of locking up his and the world’s worries in some secret mental compartment, and then enjoying himself to the top of his bent. This quality of survival, of physical toughness, of champagne ebullience is one key to the big man. Another key is this: no one has ever heard him admit that he cannot walk.”

__________

Pulled from William E. Leuchtenburg’s essay “The First Modern President,” which you’ll find in The American President or Fred I. Greenstein’s great collection Leadership in the Modern Presidency.

In context, that last sentence really does it. (Neustadt’s quote above is pulled from Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, for my money one of the most entertaining reads on the art of Presidential leadership.)

Image: ScienceSource

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What ’60s Colleges Did Right

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

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Angela Davis, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Lilla, Martin Luther King Jr., politics, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics

“The irony is that the supposedly bland, conventional schools and colleges of the 1950s and early 1960s incubated what was perhaps the most radical generation of American citizens since the country’s founding. Young people who were incensed by the denial of voting rights out there, the Vietnam War out there, nuclear proliferation out there, capitalism out there, colonialism out there. The universities of our time instead cultivate students so obsessed with their personal identities and campus pseudo-politics that they have much less interest in, less engagement with, and frankly less knowledge of the great out there. Neither Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who studied Greek) nor Martin Luther King Jr. (who studied Christian theology) nor Angela Davis (who studied Western philosophy) received an identity-based education. And it is difficult to imagine them becoming who they became had they been cursed with one. The fervor of their rebellion demonstrated the degree to which their education had developed in them a feeling of democratic solidarity, which is rare in America today.

Whatever you wish to say about the political wanderings of the sixties generation—and I’ve said a lot—they were, in their own way, patriots. They cared about what happened to their fellow citizens and cared when they felt America’s democratic principles had been violated. Even when the fringes of the student movement adopted a wooden, Marxist rhetoric, it always sounded more like Yankee Doodle Dandy than Wagner.”

__________

Taken from the ending of Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. I highly recommend Lilla’s short book, a rare example of someone writing, as it were, across the aisle — to try and problem-solve for those he has no direct political allegiance to. Since these kinds of prescriptions aren’t being offered from the left-wing of the liberal coalition now, take your good advice where you can get it.

This is the second-to-last paragraph of the book, and it ends with a continuation of this thought:

… Most [of my generation] remain well to the left of me but we enjoy disagreeing and respect arguments based on evidence. I still think they are unrealistic; they think I don’t see that dreaming is sometimes the most realistic thing one can do. (The older I get the more I think they have a point.) But we shake our heads in unison when we discuss what passes for politics and civic education in our country…

The screenshot: from The Graduate

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Why Identity Politics Fails

05 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ Comments Off on Why Identity Politics Fails

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Democrats, Elections, Government, Identity Politics, Liberalism, Mark Lilla, politics, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics

“The paradox of identity liberalism is that it paralyzes the capacity to think and act in a way that would actually accomplish the things it professes to want. It is mesmerized by symbols: achieving superficial diversity in organizations, retelling history to focus on marginal and often minuscule groups, concocting inoffensive euphemisms to describe social reality, protecting young ears and eyes already accustomed to slasher films from any disturbing encounter with alternative viewpoints. Identity liberalism has ceased being a political project and has morphed into an evangelical one. The difference is this: evangelism is about speaking truth to power. Politics is about seizing power to defend the truth…

If liberals hope ever to recapture America’s imagination and become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to beat the Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe Sixpack. They must offer a vision of our common destiny based on one thing that all Americans, of every background, actually share. And that is citizenship. We must relearn how to speak to citizens as citizens and to frame our appeals — including ones to benefit particular groups — in terms of principles that everyone can affirm. Ours must become a civic liberalism. […]

Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony. They are not therapy sessions or occasions to obtain recognition. They are not seminars or ‘teaching moments.’ They are not about exposing degenerates and running them out of town. If you want to save America’s soul, consider becoming a minister. If you want to force people to confess their sins and convert, don a white robe and head to the River Jordan. If you are determined to bring the Last Judgment down on the United States of America, become a god. But if you want to win the country back from the right, and bring about lasting change for the people you care about, it’s time to descend from the pulpit.”

__________

Pulled from Mark Lilla’s short book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, published last month.

In both its tone and substance, I think it’s as useful a Democratic roadmap as I’ve seen since last summer. (For ongoing discussion of the book, including some of its shortcomings, follow my friend Matthew Sitman.)

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The Kushner Dilemma

03 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on The Kushner Dilemma

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Charlie Rose, Corruption, David Frum, Donald Trump, Government, interview, Jared Kushner, politics, Steve Bannon

“I was in a coffee shop a few days after the election and someone I knew from childhood recognized me. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Tell me everything’s going to be okay.’

A lot of us who study politics have the impulse to give an answer to that person that will make her feel better. So we create a story wherein Steve Bannon is the source of all the irregularities and anomalies in the White House, and if only someone nicer, someone like Jared Kushner, would take over, things would be okay.

They’re not going to be okay.

With Jared Kushner you get a different set of problems than you do with Steve Bannon. Obviously he’s way less ideological. He’s not connected to Breitbart. But he doesn’t know anything. And even more than that, the problems of public integrity that have stalked this White House become worse the more power the Kushner family has.

It was the Kushner family that negotiated this $400 million payout from a Chinese state-influenced bank. Although that deal had to be dropped in the face of pressure from Congress, presumably everyday, people in the Kushner family circle are thinking of similar transactions.

And, look, 35-years-old: [he and Ivanka] are not children. That’s half your life on this planet. And they haven’t bothered to learn anything about the roles they now have.

If Jared Kushner were a truly public-spirited person, what he would do is separate himself much more fully from his business interests, and say to the president, ‘Dad, it’s clear you need an A-team here. And what I’d like to do for you is run a staffing process, whereby instead of giving your China portfolio to me, and giving your Middle East portfolio to me, and giving your Reinventing Government portfolio to me, we’ll bring in people who actually have known about these issues before November of last year. And, while we’re at it, let’s get the State Department staffed, too.’ […]

Anyone who has worked in government knows that administrations run through a deputy system. Deputies prepare information that is then handed over to principles. And, a third of the way into the first year of this presidency: no deputies.

Donald Trump may feel like a winner. I’m sure he’s a much richer man than he was on election day. But the rest of us, I think we’re all losers.”

__________

David Frum, speaking in an interview on Charlie Rose last month.

Read on:

  • David McCullough takes on Trump
  • Appraising Ronald Reagan
  • How war created the modern state

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The Story of Your Era

11 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

interview, Matsuo Bashō, politics, Social Change, Will Self

Questioner: Looking at our political lives today, how do you talk to young people about the future?

Will Self: I think a lot about how the world was when I was in my early 20s, when I was finishing university…

And what strikes me is how much more anxious young people are now than we were, and this despite the fact that when I left university there was major unemployment, we were losing manufacturing jobs hand over fist. Our foreign policy was unstable; we were still living under the shadow of the mushroom cloud and a dispensation of mutually assured destruction. There were legitimate fears about Soviet aggression. A lot of these things you would imagine hit some of the same buttons in some of the same combinations, and yet… and yet… and yet… we weren’t as anxious as a lot of people are now.

And you know what, I think people are right to be more anxious now, oddly. Obviously that’s offered with the benefit of hindsight, but my suspicion is they are right to be more anxious…

I honestly think if I were a young person now I would concentrate, not selfishly on my own life; I think it’s very important in life to have compassion toward others and to do things for other people. But I would not place any expectation or faith in political change. I’m sorry: that’s not the story of your era.

The story of your era is going to need to be stoical. Perform, as the great Zen poet Bashō says, random acts of senseless generosity. Engage with your work. Enjoy the spectacle of life. But I wouldn’t place any great expectations on the idea society or political systems are in some way evolving or progressing, and that if you can just figure out how to get your shoulder to the wheel in the right way, and encourage some other people to do the same, that the whole thing is going to move. I’m sorry, but I really would abandon that idea. I think you’ll have a much happier and productive life, incidentally, and probably end up doing more good.

__________

Comments adapted from Will Self’s recent interview at his office at Brunel University. I like his answer, but can’t bring myself to agree.

I’m sorry: that’s not the story of your era…

Image courtesy of Pin Drop Studio.

Go on:

  • Self: Why I’ll never teach creative writing
  • Philip Roth on how we misread others
  • MLK outlines how to conquer self-centeredness

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Foreseeing a President Trump in 1998

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ Comments Off on Foreseeing a President Trump in 1998

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Achieving Our Country, Donald Trump, Elections, Government, Paul von Hindenburg, politics, President, Richard Rorty, Sinclair Lewis

Richard Rorty

“[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the sadism which the academic Left tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

__________

Excerpted from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country.

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We Don’t Carry the Burden of Disliking One Another

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, Speeches

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Al Smith Dinner, Barack Obama, Government, Mitt Romney, politics, speech

Mitt Romney

“We have very fundamental and sound principles that guide both the president and me. He and I, of course, both feel the pressures and tensions of a close contest. It would be easy to let a healthy competition give way to the personal and the petty. But fortunately we don’t carry the burden of disliking one another.

Barack has had some very fine and gracious moments. Don’t tell anyone I said so, but our 44th president has many gifts, and a beautiful family that would make any man proud.

In our country, you can oppose someone in politics and make a confident case against their policies without any ill will. And that’s how it is for me: there’s more to life than politics. […]

At the Archdiocese of New York, you show this in the work you do, in causes that run deeper than allegiance to party or any contest at the moment. No matter which way the winds are blowing… you answer with calm and willing hearts in service to the poor and care for the sick, in defense of the rights of conscience and in solidarity with the innocent child waiting to be born. You strive to bring God’s love into every life.

I don’t presume to have all your support… and I’m certainly not going ask for it. But you can be certain that in the great causes of compassion that you come together to embrace, I stand proudly with you as an ally and friend.”

__________

From Mitt Romney’s speech at the famous Al Smith dinner, given around this time four years ago.

So much to like here. Though I didn’t vote for Mitt in the election — and wrote here and there why I decided not to — I admire the guy and, four years later, think he would have made a very fine president. I especially like how much of a gentleman he is — that he consistently brings value to the communities and organizations he’s led while never succumbing to pressure to take the sleazy way out. When a challenge arises, answer with a calm and willing heart.

You can watch the (very funny) 2012 Al Smith dinner below.

Images courtesy of Vice and Wiki

More:

  • Jefferson’s ten rules
  • JFK’s speech on leading through “the new frontier”
  • Booker T. Washington talks about how great men sacrifice for others

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

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David McCullough Takes on Donald Trump

18 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics

≈ Comments Off on David McCullough Takes on Donald Trump

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David Mccullough, Donald Trump, Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, Government, Harry Truman, Honor, integrity, John F. Kennedy, politics, Presidency, Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt

David McCullough

“What has the Republican party come to? That at such an unsettling time as this, with so very much at stake, so many momentous, complex problems to be addressed — and yes, so much that we must and can accomplish — why would we ever choose to entrust our highest office, and our future, to someone so clearly unsuited for the job? Someone who’s never held public office, never served his country in any fashion.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who so admirably served his country his entire career, said there were four key qualities by which we should measure a leader: character, ability, responsibility, and experience.

Donald Trump fails to qualify on all four counts. And it should be noted that Eisenhower put character first. In the words of the ancient Greeks, character is destiny.

So much that Donald Trump spouts is so vulgar and far from the truth and mean-spirited; it is on that question of character especially that he does not measure up. He is unwise. He is plainly unprepared, unqualified, and it often seems, unhinged. How can we possibly put our future in the hands of such a man?

We’re on the whole — let’s not forget — a good country, of good people, with good intentions.

Good, even great, leaders have played decisive roles in our history, time after time. We have believed from the start in worthy achievement, and have set landmark examples for how very much can be accomplished when we work together, infused by positive spirit.

Inspired by Theodore Roosevelt, we built the Panama Canal. Led by President Harry Truman, we created the Marshall Plan. President John F. Kennedy called on us to go to the moon — and we went to the moon! Through leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, we ended the Cold War.

And there is no reason that under the right leadership, we can’t continue on that way.”

__________

David McCullough’s short video take on Trump, posted to the Facebook page “Historians on Donald Trump.”

Other highlights from McCullough:

  • How General George Washington led
  • Meet John Adams
  • Why even study history if you’ll just forget it later?

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Appraising Reagan

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Appraising Reagan

Tags

American History, Berlin Wall, Biography, Cold War, Communism, From the Shadows, Government, Jacob Weisberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, politics, Presidency, Robert Gates, Ronald Reagan, Russia, Soviet Union, Tip O'Neill

Ronald Reagan

“The daily expressions of Reagan’s long-term strategies – inveighing against deficits while creating them, aspiring to eliminate nuclear missiles while increasing them – were often inconsistent. Failure to choose between opposing alternatives sometimes produced a zigzag pattern in his presidency. But a tolerance for cognitive dissonance, like other forms of irrationality, can be an effective negotiating tactic. The Soviets, like Tip O’Neill, were never quite sure which Reagan they were bargaining with. His ability to live with contradiction was, on balance, more blessing than curse.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many people remembered having had views similar to Reagan’s about the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. But Reagan, as Robert Gates wrote in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, ‘nearly alone truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable not in some vague, long-range historical sense, but right then.’ Reagan’s commonsense view of historical inevitability was that an unworkable government was sure to break down sooner or later. ‘Communism is neither an economic or a political system – it is a form of insanity – a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature,’ he wrote in his unpublished 1962 statement, ‘Are Liberals Really Liberal?’ […]

Reagan himself never used phrases such as ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘moral clarity,’ any more than he talked about being visionary or consequential. He had a low level of self-consciousness, and expressed these concepts simply by being himself. If none of his successors formed the kind of bond he did with the country, it may be because few politicians have ever embodied the idealized national character the way Reagan did. Simplicity, innocence, and personal modesty are rare qualities in public life, and difficult ones to fake. People excused Reagan’s lapses and contradictions because they believed he was genuine and recognized themselves in his aspirations.

Reagan’s claim to the nation’s affection rests on his American personality: his homespun wit, his good nature, and his native optimism. His claim to greatness rests on his role in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. To put the case in the simplest possible terms, the Soviet Union didn’t fall; it was pushed. The push that Gorbachev gave it was the proximate cause, but it reflected pressure that Reagan began to apply four years before Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev’s goal was to render it harmless. Through the shove he gave it came from farther away, it was intended to produce the outcome that followed, one that he was nearly alone in thinking possible.”

__________

Pulled from chapters 10 (“The Ash Heap of History”) and 15 (“Tear Down This Wall”) of Jacob Weinberg’s short biography Ronald Reagan, which was published last month.

Yes, I posted this so I could chalk one up in the February ’16 column. Shameless, especially on a leap day, but the 41-month post streak is alive.

You can see Weinberg, who’s a self-identified liberal, discuss the book and some revelations about the Gipper in his recent conversation with Christopher Buckley at the 92nd St. Y.

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Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

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Adam Gopnik, and the True Enemies of Free Expression, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen, extremism, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Hypercacher, Islam, Islamism, Islamophobia, liberty, Maajid Nawaz, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Podcast, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, Waking Up Podcast

[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

__________

Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

Go on:

  • Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, talks about “the tyranny of silence”
  • A brief reflection on 25 years of the Salman Rushdie fatwa
  • Douglas Murray shows us some strangely uncontroversial cartoons

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

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How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Journalism, Politics

≈ Comments Off on How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

Tags

Benito Mussolini, Capitalism, Charles Lindbergh, China, Chinese Politics, Communism, democracy, economics, Fascism, history, Hoover Institution, innovation, interview, Iran, Japan, Journalism, New York Times, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Peter Robinson, Russia, Taiwan, technology, Thomas Friedman, Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson

Peter Robinson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes that,

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages… It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

What do you make of this “Beijing Consensus,” this view that maybe they are better suited for the future than our form of government.

Victor Davis Hanson: If you gave me ten minutes and the internet, I could give you an almost verbatim quote from what left-wing people said about Mussolini in the twenties, and what right-wing people like Charles Lindbergh said about Germany in the thirties. They make the trains run on time…

But China has a rendezvous with radical pollution problems and clean up; demographic problems, a shrinking population that will grow old before it grows rich; one male per family, imbalance between the sexes. Somehow their brilliant foreign policy cooked up a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Russia, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and maybe, in the future, a nuclear Taiwan and Japan — all right on their border.

So I don’t get this fascination that, just because you fly into the Shanghai airport and everything looks great in a way that Kennedy doesn’t, suddenly they’re the avatars of the future.

What Thomas Friedman would need to do is get on a bicycle, cross rural China, then compare that with biking across rural Nebraska to see which society is more resilient and stable.

Victor Davis Hanson

__________

A counterpoint made by VDH in his interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson several years ago. To read more, you can take a look at Hanson’s much praised study of nine of history’s most pivotal battles, Carnage and Culture.

Or you can read on:

  • VDH outlines how a Greek conception of human nature can shape your politics
  • Thomas Sowell discusses the “obvious problem with a ‘living wage'” in his interview with Robinson earlier this year
  • Martin Amis dissects how Britain, Germany, and France have each reconciled their 20th century legacies

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