Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has come out and congratulated President Biden on his performance, according to Lloyd Billingsley.
It’s been a masterclass the last two years, not necessarily in effective communication and generating narrative, but in terms of the substance under the circumstance.
Actually, I agree with Gavin. When you print and spend trillions of dollars, and wind up promising college graduate free money to pay off student loans, you can at least tie the midterms.
The problem is what comes after.
Because I would say, Governor, that what really tests the mettle of a man or a politician is
If you can keep your head when all about you.
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
You know, when there is 10 percent inflation and the stock market is going straight down and there’s a recession with no end in sight.
That’s when it really pays if you have read the books. As Ronald Reagan, the “amiable dunce,” had done.
Billlingley makes the point that neither Newsom or Biden give the impression of ever having read a book. How can he tell? Because a guy that has read a book will occasionally say something outside the regime narrative.
E.g. Sam Adams. I’m reading a biography of Sam, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff. Did you know that Sam, born in 1722, a mere century after the founding of Boston, went to Boston Latin and then Harvard at a time when the only thing you learned at Harvard was Latin and Greek classics. When Adams submitted a essay for his Masters in 1747, it was all about the valid grounds for revolution. The Brits, by the way, were really upset that so many of the New England notables were well educated and really knew their stuff. Harvard, old chap.
Of course, my conceit is that I have read a lot of books, from the libertarian classics of Mises and Hayek to the “German Turn” of Kant to the Frankfurt School to Habermas. I confess that I only really understood what this had done for me about five years ago, when I really started to analyze where the writer of a piece was coming from. Was he/she repeating popular opinion, or was there an indication of some idea out of the ordinary?
Does it matter? I’d say that the more reading you have done the more you can illuminate the world with the ideas you have read about, and the more you can make sense of the world.
If you have read nothing, then all you can do is react to the world.
If you have read a little, e.g., as a Marxist, then you can illuminate the world, but only in a harsh light from one direction, and that makes the world you experience two-dimensional.
If you have read a lot then you can illuminate the world from several directions and you can experience the world in three dimensions, and even add time to make four dimensions.
In ordinary times it probably doesn’t matter too much that the nation’s notables never read a book. But when things are screwed up, and the nation’s leaders have to make some difficult decisions, then it does matter whether the decision makers ever read a book.
Let’s hope that the rising generation of leaders have read a book. Or two.