Note: see language log. they need to define passive here (doesn’t have to be the grammatical form, but what do they mean).
The modern talking presidency, drawing on the resources of an extensive staff of writers, idea generators, and message consultants, is a phenomenon of the post-1945 years.’ (Location 190)
struggle; it drew leaders and nation into tight and urgent relationships. It formed a way of articulating public life in which society, power, and history pressed down on individual lives as inescapably dense and weighty presences. (Location 199)
Across the divide between the free and the Communist worlds two differently organized social systems confronted each other: not two world-spanning geopolitical powers, merely, but two antagonistic patterns of social roles and norms, two profoundly different ways of organizing political power and authority, two competing understandings of the long march of history. Freedom was at the center of Cold War political rhetoric, but within these urgent contexts, freedom was inescapably social and public. (Location 201)
Note: their point here is that he politics of the Cold War is public and was constructed as a public issue. but the other interesting point is the manichean nature of the Cold War - good and evil. no longer “politics” but freedom and geopolitical incarceration. that is one narrative for an alignment of right with freedom and libertarianism and totalitarianism with the left.
piketty wd point out the U.S. and UK v Europe nature of post-war recovery.
this is relevant to curtis’s “atomised” interpretation of current events. his narrative tho is not the only one.
The high urgencies of Cold War politics mirrored the theme of intense, agonistically difficult choice that ran through existentialist literature, neo-orthodox theology, and the theater stage. (Location 206)
Note: see CS Lewis’s point about freedom, which is important.
Eisenhower drew out the theme in 1955:It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or of forms of government, or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the Psalmist described as “a little lower than the angels” … or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man’s destiny.6 (Location 227)
If there was a distinctive thread in Reagan’s prepresidential speeches it was the way they turned the Cold War’s anxieties back on domestic politics-their displacement of the totalitarian nightmare from the world scene to the stealthy, creeping, insidious growth of government at home. “We’ll adopt emergency ‘temporary’ totalitarian measures, until one day we’ll awaken to find we have grown so much like the enemy that we no longer have any cause for conflict,” Reagan warned in 1961. (Location 285)
Note: where we are now? the Middle America tradition? (something falsified at every step - Schopenhauer.
By the time Reagan entered the White House, freedom’s nemesis had migrated into the psyche. Freedom’s deepest enemy was pessimism: the mental undertow of doubt, the paralyzing specter of limits, the “cynic who’s trying to tell us we’re not going to get any better.” (Location 320)
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again”-“that stupendously dumb statement by Tom Paine,” as George Will termed it, that slap in the face of continuity and tradition, that radically unconservative statement of human hubris-was virtually the whole of Reagan’s Paine. But it was all he needed, just as the phrase from one of the early twentieth century’s most prominent intellectual socialists and free-love (Location 333)
advocates-”all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn”-was all Reagan’s speechwriters needed of H. G. Wells. Searching for the right quotation to end his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, Reagan gave them the cosmic optimism of American history’s most radical Deist, Paine.21 (Location 335)
Anthony Dolan: protege of William Buckley, Catholic, and articulately conservative. It was he who, given the National Association of Evangelicals speech that no one else thought important in 1983, succeeded in injecting into it the “evil empire” phrase he had floated, only to be overruled, some months before. (Location 341)
All presidential speechwriting is fraught with contest. “Each speech was a battle in a never-ending war,” Peggy Noonan remembered, each metaphor a hard-fought skirmish in the continuous struggle over policies and politics that marked the speechwriting process during Reagan’s administration.31 (Location 357)
The eclipse of words thick with a sense of society, history, and responsibility by the new rhetoric of psychic optimism was abetted by the new focus-group techniques that had begun to move in a big way into Republican campaign management strategies in the 1980 contest. In a typical session, a group of one or two dozen people, each gripping a handheld response device, viewed the precast of an advertisement or listened to the draft of a speech. When they heard a phrase they liked, they squeezed, and an analyzer correlated the phrase, the images, and the squeezes together. They squeezed eagerly when they heard the words “reach,” “free,” and “America.” They squeezed on positive terms. They did not like hearing worrisome words such (Location 364)
Even as the sharply critical shots at totalitarianism continued, the face of the nation’s enemies was reconstructed. They were no longer the masters of the Kremlin; now they were the doubters, the qualifiers, the realists without vision. “Let (Location 391)
the rituals of church and state been more blurred in the post-1945 years than in the way in which presidential speech making capitalized on the forms of Protestant preaching. The resemblance ran much deeper than the references to God sprinkled heavily throughout presidential speeches or the benedictory forms with which they closed. Adaptation of sermonic authority and sermonic cadence was integral to the high presidential style. The people gathered together-preacher and congregation-to hear their civic creed reaffirmed, their mandate of leadership accepted, and their duties made clear. The pulpit rose above the pews. The words that came from it bound the people and their president together and made sacred the responsibilities of both. (Location 402)
Note: this is another aspect of the lie behind first person pronoun analysis of speeches. it ignores the deliberately crafted extent to which “we” ℅-opts people and its congregational aspects.
In other countries, governments told the people what to do. In contrast, “Our revolution is the first to say the people are the masters and government is their servant.”47 (Location 451)
The division was old in Reagan’s rhetoric. “Already the hour is late,” he had warned in 1964. “Government has laid its hand on health, housing, (Location 453)
farming, industry, commerce, education …” For the Constitution’s drafters, the phrase “We the People” had been a legitimating device:a means to give moral and political foundation to a stronger national government. In Reagan’s speeches, the same words were refashioned to distance the natural, spontaneous acts of the people from the work of those they elected to be their (Location 454)
one. Reagan asked viewers, not to imitate them or to rise to the challenge they set, but only to applaud them, to believe that their acts were possible. “We the people,” as a (Location 486)
What he lost were its words and its rhetorical gestures, its collectively enacted rituals of urgency, the language of obligation and responsibility that had been its inextricable attachment. (Location 497)
In the place of the style that had reigned since the 1940s, he offered a less urgent and commanding presidency, a seamless and tension-drained sense of time, a set of dreams and narratives in the place of old-style demands and certainties, a vision of freedom without obstacles or limits, a vocabulary of public words not abandoned but quietly individualized and privatized, a populism whose representation of the people dissolved society into pieces. (Location 499)
In times of “substantial unemployment” economics entered a “topsy-turvy wonderland” where the commonsense rules of economic relations ran backward or failed to run at all. Even in ordinary economic times, students needed to understand the “fallacy of composition”-to realize that the laws of aggregate, social economic behavior were often distinctly different from individually modeled economic action. (Location 601)
the expected relationship fell apart into theoretical chaos. (Location 624)
Throughout the nervous search for economic policy in the 1970s, virtually all the politically viable programs assumed that restoring economic stability was a task of conscious social and institutional compromise. (Location 632)
Even Samuelson was to write of the “failure of any paradigm to deliver theThe economic crisis of the 1970s was, in short, not merely a crisis in management. It was also, and at least as painfully, a crisis in ideas and intellectual authority. (Location 642)
Recasting historical experience as predictive law (Location 659)
That social scientists possessed the capacity to deduce the rules of social optimization but not the capacity to administer them might have seemed, in another context, an odd sort of confidence. But as it was, Friedman used his scholarly prestige in monetary theory to give his libertarian opinions an air of economic certainty that he was not at all shy to exploit. (Location 674)
where the law’s case-by-case rhetoric seemed less and less to comprehend the issues or to offer any larger, socially adequate resolution, law and economics operated as a compelling instrument of simplification. (Location 775)
“the body of economic principle … offers objectivity-terra firma-upon which we can base decisions.”38 (Location 780)
But the power of a generalized idea of automatically working market efficiency ran stronger than Breyer’s institutionalist realism. (Location 808)
At the World Bank, where Robert McNamara had forcefully steered policies toward poverty alleviation and public sector development in the 1970s, his successors in the early 1980s, the banker A. W. Clausen and the chief economist Anne Krueger, were much more alarmed by “government failure” than by market failures. (Location 969)
Failing to recognize power, he charged, economistsfailed to comprehend the institutional inequalities that pervaded economic life. “In eliding power,” economics “destroys its relation with the real world.” It “becomes, however unconsciously, a part of an arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he is, or will be, governed.“’ (Location 1010)
Note: stirrings of the theory of managerial competence. (find lrb article)
What conservative new class theorists put in their place was modern society’s still larger array of knowledge and symbolic workers: professionals, educators, cultural producers, and technocrats. (Location 1084)
Behind all of these works stood the civic actor and legislator as calculator and self-interestedly “rational” actor, sniffing out advantages, cycling through tactically shifting alliances, extracting goods and resources from the political system, burdening collective action with private ends, maximizing reelection chances by carefully calibrated policy positioning.13 (Location 1121)
The very method of rational-choice analysis reflected the conditions it sought to illuminate.‘8 (Location 1154)
But in the new models of politics, domination-the subjection of groups to the will of others-all but slipped out of the categories of analysis. (Location 1161)
What then was power? The class theorists on the left and the right had imagined power instantiated in the material structures of class. The neo-Gramscians had imagined it hanging, like a veil over the eyes of the many, in the dominant class’s construction of reality. Geertz and the cultural historians had vested it in rituals and theaters of meaning. (Location 1396)
