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“James Madison” By Garry Wills


I checked this book out from the library because I had very much enjoyed Wills’ Inventing America, which was about Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. He’s a fine stylist, though this slim volume on James Madison is not the best introduction to him (though a decent introduction to Madison).

Part of a series of books on American presidents (to which Arthur Schlesinger placed his imprimatur), Wills struggles manfully to write an introduction to one of the most intellectually interesting men to ever be president that is simultaneously under 150 pages, covers the major points, and is new/interesting. To he credit, he doesn’t like the middle prerogative interfere too much.

He tries to put more of emphasis on Madison’s presidency, which he suggests has been given short shrift in the past and treated as an embarrassing interlude, rather than the highpoint. While not necessarily revisionist, he argues that the War of 1812 didn’t end as badly as most of us think and that Madison, though not a natural executive, was more successful that he is given credit for.

Interesting fact I learned from this book: A young Benjamin Franklin, attempting to make a name for himself in London, decides to return to America where geniuses are less thick on the ground, so more likely to be rewarded; he expresses this sentiment as part of his correspondence with David Hume!

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‘The Imperial Presidency’ By Arthur Schlesinger


While the late great Gore Vidal almost had some choice words for the man who has been described as Camelot’s court historian, I am glad to have finally read something longer than an old New Yorker essay by Schlesinger. He’s a good, though not great stylist and enjoyed the history I learned, though part of me wishes that he had also written a more concise version, where the polemical aspect could have shown through more brightly when it comes the general thesis (his deep and understandable antipathy towards Nixon amply shines through).

Indeed, even as he charts the presidency through nearly two hundred years, even before reaching 1968, Nixon surfaces on a regular basis.

But the most interesting part was the very end. I can rightly recommend just skipping the first few hundred pages to get there, but it’s a little tempting. He criticizes those – and I have been among that number – who say that a parliamentary system could resolve many of the issues around that titular imperial presidency. He really just looks at the British model (which is very nearly a two party model) and points out that the Prime Minister is even more empowered than an American style president with even fewer guardrails and says that many British commentators look longingly at our system. And, yes, in this Trumpian world, a supine Republic parliamentary majority and a Trump PM does feel frightening, especially without any contemporary tradition of members being willing to fall on their swords to depose a rogue PM of their own party.

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Why We Did It


Fascinating. Sort of. Actually, it was just interesting to return to my old world of political oppo and flacking, but from the other side of the aisle. You see, once upon a time, I had similar jobs, though I never rose as high. He makes some nice distinctions, such between a campaign guy (like himself, and, generally, me) and a Hill rat. But that’s not what this book is about, well sort of not. In some ways, it is a sort of anthropological study of a segment of Washington, DC (please note – Washingtonians pay more in tax dollars than they get back and most of the city has nothing to do with politics and government or things related to that world; most of the city works in restaurants, banks, retail shops, construction, etc; also, the last Democratic campaign bar, Stetson’s closed years ago; I’m not sure what the point of that last one is, but there you are).

But, I really could have used fewer sex-related insults. ‘Fluffer’ and ‘Trumpian cum dumpster’ felt a bit too much for me. Also, based on a relatively small sample size, the use of ‘butt hurt’ as a sort of insult, which combines implications of weak masculinity with gay panic humor, seems to be a conservative ‘thing.’ Can’t say I get the appeal.

He had a fun, if reductive and hackneyed list of various kinds of political strivers, from the Messiahs to Little Mixes (people who want to be – his word choice, not mine, though he acknowledges its tackiness – ‘the room where it happened), but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something similar on Wonkette or the old (fun) Politico.

Miller’s depiction of his slow (?) descent into selling out (?) to the far right also felt rushed. He’s a better flack than he is a writer of long form non-fiction, I’d say.

I did learn one fun tidbit. After Trump had learned that he tested positive for COVID, he called up Chris Christie and asked him to play the role of Biden in debate prep. Unsurprisingly, Christie also contracted COVID and eventually ended up in the ICU, fearing for his life (his eternal soul? not sure). Trump called to make sure Christie wasn’t going to go public and blame him for getting COVID.

Overall? Well, I’m not saying it’s not fun to read Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer get their sad ambitions and wishy-washy nerdiness mocked, but I could also just watch an episode from the first season of the Big Bang Theory.

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‘Liberalism And Its Discontents’ By Francis Fukuyama


Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would have read this much Fukuyama, I would have laughed at you. Though, I should hedge that ‘this much’ – most of his recent books have been pretty short.

He suggests he is making an argument for classical liberalism, but I would suggest that he’s really making the argument for liberal democracy. I say that because he is not deeply interested in economic issues.

It’s a short and useful read. While not its purpose, the book makes another argument that the American right is unknowingly carrying the banner for postmodernism and French theory, most recently for mimicking Foucault’s theory of power and science in its arguments again mask mandates and vaccines.

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Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction


I read this not so much because I wanted to learn about Alexis de Tocqueville (I read Democracy in America many years ago, but could stand to dip into it again), but because I wanted to read something by Harvey Mansfield and this was all the DC Public Library had. My YouTube blackhole led me to Bill Kristol’s channel (Conversations with William Kristol), specifically to an interview with Harvey Mansfield about Leo Strauss. I used to see Kristol all the time; he and I got our coffee at the same dinky coffee/bagel place on the ambiguous border between downtown and Dupont Circle, near the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle. It felt like a personal affront. But, he’s anti-Trump and I try to be relatively broad-minded, so I was feeling generous with my time (and also, I like to fall asleep to videos like that). Well, I can still say that Bill is a shallow and tendentious thinker, but he does sometimes like to talk to interesting people are not shallow and tendentious.

So books like these are not really great introductions to either the supposed topics or to the authors of these little things.

Did I learn anything about Harvey Mansfield? That he is not afraid how the ‘liberal’ has been perverted to use it in something closer to it’s traditional sense (though I don’t necessarily agree with his hints at a more comprehensive definition, which somehow fails to primarily be about more or less free markets, rule of law, and respect for civic institutions). That he wants Tocqueville to be respected as a political philosopher, even if the man himself was dismissive of ‘philosophers’ (a fair point by Mansfield). Where he lost me completely was calling France of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s ‘socialist.’ If you’re going to call Louis-Napoleon president and later emperor or a socialist country, you can’t just drop that remark and move on. Back that thing up, please.

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Dark Rising: Magic And Power In The Age of Trump


Does… does… does Gary Lachman believe in Chaos Magick? And, yes, that’s how he spells it. Because Aleister Crowley spelled it that way.

There is some fascinating stuff about how, similar to other fascist groups, the alt-right has developed connections to occult ideas and, yes, The Power of Positive Thinking is, when you think about it, simultaneously stupid and weird and vaguely occult (and cultish).

The stuff on Traditionalism is slightly different from what’s in The War for Eternity, though not sufficiently so to justify itself.

But, but, but… does he believe it’s real? I spent most of the book asking myself, I am reading the work of a crazy man?

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The Essential Debate On The Constitution


I put this book on hold on account of Bailyn’s presence as an editor, even after my disappointment in volume of his own writing. Of course, it’s not really about him (his preface is remarkable in its brevity and lack of information), but about reading these late eighteenth century American political writings.

It’s easy to say that, wow, look at how literate and intelligent this discourse was, why can’t we be like that, but I’m certain there were plenty of broadsheets being passed around calling the other side out for scatalogical fixations. And, who knows that a hundred years from now, the four years (thus far?) of Trump’s reign may be collected in volumes depicting the debates of the age as a discourse between Ross Douthat’s melancholy concern trolling and David Brooks’ hand wringing exercises?

The argument in favor of ratification are well known due to the canonization of the Federalist Papers, some of which, like Federalists 10 and 30, are collected here (to the editors’ credit, they try not to simply collect Federalists, but to find other documents in support of ratification).

The arguments against are probably less well known, or, at least, were less well known to me. The rightness of the ratificationist cause was taught as an uncomplicated truth in my schooling. The writings of ‘Brutus,’ whose identity is not known for certain, I believe, part of the so-called ‘Anti-Federalist Papers,’ are particularly interesting and well written. That said, arguments that a federal government would take away state independence feel overwrought when states feel so presently empowered to pass whatever racist and discriminatory laws that their White majorities might want.

What struck me most was how suddenly prescient the warnings about the Supreme Court feel now. They feel almost prophetic, especially when you think that they were written before Wilson and Marshall instituted judicial review. The opportunity for unsupervised and unaccountable judges was well recognized then. I will admit to a certain ambivalence. I find judicial elections unnerving, because its feels like justice is vulnerable to being warped to support re-election.

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Jesus And John Wayne


John Wayne is an outsized figure in this book. Both the real John Wayne and the symbol. Whereas Bad Faith centered white evangelicalism’s turn to partisan politics in race, Du Mez centers it in gender and patriarchy and finds its origins much earlier in the twentieth century.

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American Scripture: Making The Declaration Of Independence


Described as a bit of a broadside against Garry Wills’ earlier book on the subject, rather than situate the Declaration within a pan-European intellectual environment, with special attention to the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, Maier is more interested in a strictly American context. The state and local proclamations that preceded it, for example. She is not terribly interested in the philosophical background of it (though she is interested in the philosophical implications).

If I’m honest, I found Wills to be a better writer. This is partly because I wasn’t too interested in the straight revolutionary history that makes up the first third or so the book.

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‘Washington, D.C.’ By Gore Vidal


To my great joy, early in the book, a young man fantasizes that he is within the Barsoomian tales of Burroughs. Even more enjoyable, for me, at least, he name drops neither, just a character you’d only know from having read the books (or seen the movie).

This character grow into a sort of Vidal stand-in; an elite-born man who became a polemical political moralist, who also knew political Washington inside and outside.

Of course, the Washington of Washington, D.C. doesn’t exist anymore. Not in the least because you’ll rarely see Senators hanging around the city on weekends (they are back in the states they represent). But this book also realizes that. At one point, an aging, mostly moral, lion of the Senate muses that he almost lost re-election after being outspent and confesses some confusion over how television and radio ads changed things.

I gather he retroactively incorporated this into his ‘Narratives of Empire’ series, but it lakes the scope and sweep of the two I have read (Burr and Lincoln). It felt rather personal, not in the least because it covered a time when he was growing up in this older Washington.

That said, one can see in the aspiring politician Vidal’s critiques of Kennedy. In the leftist intellectual seduced by that rising star, Arthur Schlesinger (I don’t know what Vidal thought of him). But it’s not exact and more a nearby critique, than a direct one.

Lord help me, in many ways, it’s more Henry James than Gore Vidal, but the better for it. I had set aside my affections for him, but this reminded me that, actually, he’s a d—m fine novelist.