Modernity and its Discontents

The Existence of an Unsolvable Problem As a thought, I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Roosevelt and Taft in Bully Pulpit.   Although for the most part narrative history, she does make one analytical point – Roosevelt was able to push through progressive reforms – that is to say, trust busting reforms – for a number of reasons, the most salient being his informal partnership with the journalists of McClure’s Magazine.   The journalists successfully exposed the abuses of power associated with the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and Roosevelt was able to leverage that exposure to develop popular (almost populist) pressure against the entrenched forces of wealth.   As many have noted, we live in a new Gilded Age, with enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few people, though there are some salient differences, one of which is the influence of the press.   We have a muck-raking press just as thorough, just as evidence-based ...

Jon D. Michaels, “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Fights Back,” Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 2017. Michaels begins his article with an observation.   “One of the strangest aspects of the current era,” he writes, “is that the president of the United States seems to have little interest in running the country’s government.”   It’s something of a truism that there are differences between the skills necessary to secure an office and those necessary to hold onto an office, and those necessary to both securing and holding differ from those necessary to actually doing the job implied by the office.     Likewise, initially, as is the case with all American politicians subject to election and re-election, the concerns of securing and holding office take on a sort of continuing precedence over “doing the job,” for the obvious reason that one cannot do the job if one is not in the job.     We all know, of course, there are many motivations for seeking office...