Reign of Think?
Wikipedia changes daily and the targets of this post hate it (it doesn’t pay them), but here is the link to Calvin Coolidge, another guy the Thinkers would hate. A couple of quotes from that article.
As his biographer (Fuess) later put it, “he embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength.”
After graduating from Amherst, at his father’s urging, Coolidge moved to Northampton, Massachusetts to take up the practice of law. Avoiding the costly alternative of attending a law school, Coolidge followed the more common practice at the time of apprenticing with a local firm, Hammond & Field…Coolidge was able to open his own law office in Northampton in 1898, where he practiced transactional law, believing that he served his clients best by staying out of court. As his reputation as a hard-working and diligent attorney grew, local banks and other businesses began to retain his services
The next year, 1904, Coolidge met with his only defeat before the voters, losing an election to the Northampton school board. When told that some of his neighbors voted against him because he had no children in the schools he would govern, Coolidge replied “Might give me time!”
Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of their dinner parties, he replied “Got to eat somewhere.”
Representing the genius of the average, skipping grad school to save money, actually working as a transaction lawyer, losing an election to the school board, coming back with a quip, uncomfortable with Washington swells…hmmm, sound familiar. And that is before getting to Cal’s cleaning up his own party’s ethical problems.
The main gist of this post is more a question. Will the US ever see another man or woman of action and real integrity in high political office? Or have we as a people decayed to the point: where we can’t discern real straight talk from high sounding words, where we can’t discern a person of real integrity from fluffy claims, where we can’t muster the personal fortitude to care? Kathleen Parker, Christoper Buckley, David Brooks, and other “Thinking Conservatives” have all jumped on Sarah Palin - a cancer, an embarassment, and other snotty phrases. Roger Kimball answers many of those writers with roughly the argument that they overvalue their own trade - thinking.
The modern world seems to have built a very thick filter around political office. What that filter does is clean out all men and women who are primarily disposed to action. That filter selects based on your facility to think, or at least mimic thinking. Please note that this thinking is not the thinking that engineers do, or that businessmen do, or that mothers do to raise children. This thinking is restricted to “big thoughts” and “big themes”. The kind of thinking done at say, Harvard.
Let’s look at some past great presidents: Washington - soldier and farmer, Lincoln - lawyer entreprenuer, Coolidge - lawyer entreprenuer, Reagan - success in highly competitve Hollywood. The common thread in almost all great past presidents is success in something else before politics, and success that necessitated taking risks. (Not all fit this. FDR appears an exception, but TR was clearly an action based risk taker who happened to be able to “Think”.) The “Thinking Pols” of today have much handed to them with the fat envelope to Harvard. Not everything, but that is the start of the filter. Anyone, other than a general or a combat veteran who the Thinkers have to hold their manhoods cheap next too, who does not have something approaching this is mercilessly attacked.
Questioning if that filter is appropriate, or supporting someone who doesn’t make it through that filter, either by skirting it in the frontier of Alaska, or in the military, or by making a forture and using it, does not make someone anti-intellectual. It does not disdain thought. It puts “Thinking” in its right place. It places character, actions and successful experience before thinking. Would anyone like to also have a holder of high political office who could be a big thinker? Yes. Is the lack of that a major disqualification? No. A high view of virtue, a strong sense of personal character, a knowledge of what risks are good and what are foolhardy in the path to success are much more important. The Thinking can be outsourced when you have those which give you the ability to choose the right thinkers.
The reign of the thinkers is not good for the U.S. Until the country returns to its fundamental character in favor of people of action it will not be well served.
