On the Vox Generation of Punditry (Updated) — Crooked Timber. Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide- ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy. Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia. All documentaries available on WatchDocumentary.com listed in one page.
But he also said some things that were true. Like this: When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger. Nor did Obama do much about the coup in Egypt or Honduras. To the contrary, in fact. But that wasn’t the focus of last night’s chatter on Twitter. Instead, the pundits and experts were keen to establish the absolutely unprecedented nature of Trump’s irresponsibility: his recklessness when it came to NATO, his adventurism, his sheer reveling in being the Bad Boy of US Foreign Policy: this, it was agreed, was new. In a tweet that got passed around by a lot of journalists, Peter Singer, senior fellow at the New America Foundation (who’s written a lot of books on US foreign policy), had this to say. Hmm, let’s see. Barry Goldwater said the US should consider using tactical nukes in Vietnam, which prompted one of the most famous campaign commercials of all time. As Seth Ackerman quipped to me in an email: TRUMP IS SO UNPRECEDENTED IN HIS RECKLESSNESS HE COULD LEAD TO A NUCLEAR BOMB GOING OFF RIGHT AFTER A LITTLE GIRL PICKS DAISIES IN A FIELD!! That wasn’t just the crazy talk of Dr. This Election Day, the former head psychologist for the US Navy SEALs reveals his best trick to calm down quickly. To link to this poem, put the URL below into your page: <a href='http:// of Myself by Walt Whitman</a> Plain for Printing. That was the reality that Dr. Strangelove was satirizing. Up through at least the first term of the Reagan Administration—and probably beyond—high officials in the national security establishment were talking about fighting and winning a nuclear war. One of the US Army field manuals stated: The US Army must be prepared to fight and win when nuclear weapons are used. Political elites? My mind wandered to Ted Knight’s Judge Smails from Caddyshack. But there may something less funny going on here. Fair Use Notice: Note on delayed publication of full reports as soon as they come out; Watch out for disinformation! Responsibilities of a reporter.A lot of these pundits and reporters are younger, part of the Vox generation of journalism. Unlike the older generation of journalists, whose calling card was that they know how to pick up a phone and track down a lead, the signature of this younger crew is that they know their way around J- STOR. Many of them have read the most up- to- date social science as well as the best history, from Ira Katznelson to Eric Foner and so on. Bouie, in particular, is among the most talented and learned of his generation. His articles, even when I disagree with them, are well- researched and grounded in the latest scholarship. Yet so many of them seem to lack the most basic gut impulse of any historically minded person: if you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not. Check your amnesia, dude. Part of this is due, as David Marcus reminded me, to the fact that though some of them do read history, a lot of them tend toward the more ahistorical branches of the social sciences. Psychology and econ or the quantitative or rational choice parts of poli sci, without the more historically focused mediations of a subfield like American political development, which not only teaches us about the temporal dimensions of American politics (that allegedly permanent rules and norms sometimes change) but also about the temporal underpinnings of our knowledge of American politics. But that’s not all of it, I don’t think. Though I’m a political theorist, one of the things I benefited from growing up when I did was that I had incredible history teachers: first in high school (Allan Damon, Tom Corwin, and Steve Houser, unbelievable all) and then as a history major in college (John Murrin, Arno Mayer, Lawrence Stone, among others). What all of these teachers gave me, beyond some rudimentary awareness of the past, was an unshakeable sense of the historical nature of knowledge. The sense that all of us are embedded in time, that when we look back to the past we’re doing so with questions from our present, that every consensus is contingent and provisional, that today’s knowledge is just tomorrow’s belief. Some people get this from Gadamer, I got it from E. H. Carr, which we read in high school European History. Even when they read history: because they’re led to believe, once they’ve digested Katznelson or Foner or whomever, that they’re really getting the truth, the past as it was, without that sense that Katznelson on the New Deal is only this generation’s New Deal. And that tomorrow we’ll have another New Deal. I’m not quite sure how far we can take this—sometimes, often, I feel paralyzed by the sense of relativism this leaves me with—but it does induce a certain humility. And, as I said, a basic gut check when it comes to claims about the absolute novelty of our situation. Update (July 2. 2)On a related note, here is Matt Yglesias today: Being president of the United States is hard work. It’s important work, and Donald Trump has proven time and again he’s much too lazy to do the job. All he wants to do is tell stories about his movie days.”Reagan himself told a biographer, “I’m a lazy fellow. I work up to a certain point, but beyond that point, I say the hell with it.”Early on, the Washington Post reported, “More disquieting than Reagan’s performance or prospects on any specific issue is a growing suspicion that the president has only a passing acquaintance with some of the most important decisions of his administration.”The Los Angeles Times described a president so removed “from the day- to- day workings of the White House. As Alex Gourevitch reminded me, they said the same thing about George W. Remember all those vacations he took? Do we honestly think that if he had worked harder he would have been less terrifying? When your entire belief system is jackboots and smiles, it doesn’t get less scary because you work harder; the opposite, in fact. Honestly, I’m thankful Reagan was as lazy as he was. God only knows how much more havoc he might have wreaked had he been awake during those precious afternoon nap hours. Likewise, Donald Trump. The notion here is that if he had more knowledge of the things he talks about, if he just worked harder at his job, his positions would be moderated.
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