Month: February 2014
Reagan at GE
I don’t know what anyone else will make of it, but I think Pete Spiliakos has written one of the most perceptive partisan political diagnoses you’re likely to read in the next few months.
The official title when it was published was “Enough Talk About Entrepreneurs,” which I suppose is defensible since I might not have read it had the working title, disclosed by the URL, made the final cut: “What Mitt Could Have Learned from Reagan.”
Yet as far as I’m concerned, that uninspiring working title is the key inspiration of the piece:
It is worth comparing Romney’s life experiences to Ronald Reagan. One of Reagan’s jobs was to talk limited government politics to GE’s unionized and overwhelmingly Democratic employees. If Reagan wasn’t connecting with those workers, he was failing. Reagan managed to get a sense of the priorities of those workers. He got a sense of how those employees saw their work, the past, and their own lives.
Eventually, Reagan had a better sense of blue collar workers than liberal politicians like Walter Mondale and Mario Cuomo who were rhetorically dependent on heavily mythologized visions from the 1930s. Liberal journalists loved Mario Cuomo’s absurdly overrated speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, but Reagan carried Cuomo’s home state.
Reagan’s liberal opponents treated his appeal to wage earners as some combination of larceny and sorcery, but the truth was that Reagan was just better at listening to the wage earners of his own time while his opponents believed those wage earners were duty-bound to buy whatever distorted version of the past the Democratic party was selling. What Republican is listening so well to the concerns of today’s wage earners when it comes to national issues?
I think this really was a lot of Reagan’s charm and success, and that those who yammer about returning to “Reagan principles” of endless tax cuts are a bunch of mindless fetishists, mistaken about the source of his charm and projecting their own ideology onto historic memory.
I think more middle Americans should be voting Republican, and would if the GOP wasn’t so blatantly indifferent to them, obsequious toward plutocrats. I don’t think Liberal Groin Pieties have much cachet beyond the Democrats’ “vote your vice” base. My contempt for the GOP has nothing to do with admiration of the post-1972 Democrat party.
But I think the GOP is rapidly pissing away the opportunity to give the Democrats such a thorough political thrashing that they’ll start whistling a different tune out of an instinct for survival.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Republican plutocrats versus Democrat sexual libertines. Seems pretty mad to me.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Abe Lincoln’s Birthday
I’m not a huge Lincoln fan. Don’t ask why. It’s complicated, and the zeitgeist doesn’t want to hear it.
Note that I said “not a huge … fan.” I know how to write “I hate Lincoln” and could have written that if I meant that.
But here’s a good evocative poem for his birthday from The Writer’s Almanac.
And a few days ago, First Things had an article with a lede (“Though Abraham Lincoln was neither baptized nor joined a church of any kind, he was the most spiritually minded president in American history”) that made me think “Ah! At last! A neocon source sees fit to tell one of the less-than-flattering truths!”
I went to read it for confirmation of my pre-existing bias and came away a little less biased. This, for instance, made me afford a little respect for one of his less-than-flattering traits:
So why did he never join a church himself? Two reasons. First, he was offended by the religious rivalry and braggadocio of the frontier preachers of his day. None of them made a compelling case to his lawyerly mind that only one denomination was right and all the others wrong. Further, Lincoln was reticent, “the most shut-mouthed man I know,” as his law partner William Herndon said. He did not want to cross the thin line between sincerity and self-righteousness. There was nothing smug about Lincoln’s faith.
Lincoln’s great achievement was to see the terrible times through which he lived in the context of God’s providential purposes. He referred to America as the almost-chosen nation and came to see himself as a “chosen instrument in the hands of the Almighty.” His firm belief that God is concerned for history and reveals his will in it drew on the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets, the teachings of the New Testament refracted through the tradition of St. Augustine, and the Calvinistic Baptists among whom he grew up.
(Lincoln’s Faith and America’s Future)
If “A dog is better than I, because a dog loves and does not judge” (Abba Xanthios), then Honest Abe’s anticipation of Silent Cal is a virtue at least of sorts.
Happy birthday, Mr. President.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Potpourri 2/12/14
Tuesday, 2/11/14
Monday 2/10/14
I’m reminded again and again of this:
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying: ‘You are mad, you are not like us.'” – Abba Anthony of Egypt.
Emily Dickinson said something like that, too, but it’s surprisingly still under copyright. Even if we disagree on who’s sane and who needs straightway handled with a chain, the shrill, mutually uncomprehending polarization ought to convince us there’s a problem.
There’s also a place to rid oneself of the starkest madness and to acquire divinest sense:
We know from the very foundations of the Church, set down in the Gospels, and in the Apostolic Canons, that the Church exists, not to judge, but to bring healing. Her mission is to make whole those who would enter into her gates, as entering into a hospital. She forces no one, for one who is forced is not open to healing. Yet the Church is also aware that sin is not really a private matter, for all sin affects everyone. She knows that even private sins have an effect on the whole of the cosmos. Therefore, the Church continues, as she has from ancient times, to give witness to the commandments of God, the hope that is found in the Gospel of Christ, and the forgiveness and healing that can lead to wholeness.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Sunday, 2/9/14
Saturday, 2/8/14
Are they really that stupid?
Like the calculated inflation of economic bubbles to give the impression of prospserity, some stories are hard to look in the face. The estimable Peggy Noonan looks one in the face anyway:
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 