Compare and contrast Victor David Hanson and Corey Robin.
Do they agree more than they disagree?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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far too serious for a Sunday afternoon when there’s a football game on. Those are long articles.
is your point that Robin is a dumbshit on the left to match against VDH on the right? I’ve heard of Robin but not really familiar with his writing and opinions.
Both interesting, nuanced reads by insightful analysts attempting to discern a meta-narrative to the shocking, recent reversal in American liberal democratic history. Both, potentially, footnotes to fascism.
What we need now are leaders. Am I missing something in those essays which told us where to make a stand? Advice about when to rally and when to concede in any of the innumerable fights soon to arise? How to organise?
It’s 1933. Substantial provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree have already been enacted and merely await the new executive’s authority. As we brace ourselves for the Enabling Act what do the astrologers do? Point to the celestial orb and mutter, “Lo!”.
if VDH is an insightful analyst he is damn good at hiding it in his newspaper columns. Which I sometimes read only because my local paper prints them.
So brace yourselves for the Peloponnesian War; seems insightful enough.
LOL! is that really in there?
I read the beginning of his article, and bailed once i realized it was much longer than the newspaper columm I expected.
That’s the VDH formula precisely. His academic specialty is ancient Greece, so when he gets into serious “analysis” everything becomes the Peloponnesian War.
I re-read Marathon, and account of the ’76 campaign in 2015. I had little memory of that race, and for reasons I don’t remember that well I thought the Democratic race in ’76 might have parallels to the GOP race this time.
The description of Carter’s campaign is not a flattering one. Carter pretty much just made stuff up. He talked about reducing the number of departments, but really couldn’t explain how he would do it. He made contradictory statements on policy.
Carter’s campaign was thematic: restoring trust after Watergate. In this sense there IS a similarity between Carter’s campaign and Trump’s. At their core both were smart enough to tap into a sense in the country that something had gone very wrong. Both were adept at positioning themselves as outsiders. Neither cared for detail in the campaign (this is ironic in Carter’s case as he was known for detail obsession as President).
This is not to suggest for one minute that there is any moral equivalence between them. I thought, and still believe, that there is more to learn from ’64 about Trump than there is from any other political cycle.
But there are similarities between Carter and Trump.
My sense is that Carter’s obsession with detail was channeling his formative experience working for Admiral Hyman Rickover.
It could be that Trump demands obsession for detail from his direct reports and their chains of command so as not to be obsessed about detail himself. I have seen that style of management a lot over 50 years of working.
It is the style of accountability that I sense is different between Trump and Carter. Carter was known for affability, not prickliness.
That is a management style comparison, not a moral one indeed.
The standards of the media and expectations of the voters have changed in 50 years. And as progressives repeatedly disappointed, we have much more specific expectation of campaign rhetoric and logical consistency than the general public.
Very insightful comment but I am still looking for guidance from the 1930s; it seems all bets are truly off.
I do not consent to read Hanson.
Robin is intermittently insightful, but his thinking is excessively categorical and he typically seems to be riding one hobby horse or another. The weakness of the hobby horse that he is riding here is its focus on a national perspective, to the neglect of local factors. The real story in American politics today is the wide and accelerating divergence between urban and rural, which long since reached a point where it is not possible to administer both under a common umbrella of laws, institutions, and rationales.
I surmise that Hanson says something like this, but takes the rural side — probably with immense pride and bitterness, “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The real, and fatal, problem is the simple fact that there are sides: a situation that is unacceptable and unsurvivable.
The two do not appear to be seeking answers to the same questions, which makes it difficult to determine an answer to BooMan’s question.
This sentence from Hanson essay was particularly revolting:
“…My countryside neighbors do not wish to hear anything about Stanford University, where I work–except if by chance I note that Stanford people tend to be condescending and pompous, confirming my neighbors’ suspicions about city dwellers…”.
This in the middle of a loooooooong essay which met and in many places exceeded Hanson’s extremely high standards of condescension and pompousness.
There are two suggestions Robin makes in the forwarding of his historical analogies which I do not support. The first is his view that Trump “…might save his party by renovating it from within.” Robin gives far too much credit to Trump’s “…rail(ing) against the plutocratic union of money and state power.” Sure, he did this during the campaign, but that was the purest suckering of the rubes imaginable, as has been made clear by Trump’s choices of Cabinet nominees. These are plutocratic choices meant to serve the desires of the radical Republican Congressional Caucuses we are stuck with at the moment. Absent international trade and relations with Russia, there is little evidence that Trump intends to change modern Republican domestic or foreign policies. It’s disappointing that Robin can write this after Trump’s Cabinet nominees made it clear that the incoming Administration will be governing by and for plutocrats, with additional sops tossed to white nationalist and Christian fundamentalists. Again, these sops do not shift the previously existing GOP base.
Trump’s peculiar ability to manipulate the media has refined modern Republican political campaigning, but it has not changed it significantly. His demonizing rhetoric, and its targets, are little different from that constructed by Newt Gingrich in 1994. No policy renovation is on hand.
That extraordinary level of demagoguery in the middle of a Presidential transition is part of what leaves me much less sanguine than Robin that the Trump Administration will fall within conventional historical norms. Robin leads his discussions thru historical comparisons with past political eras, all of which Trump has promised to overturn. Neither Trump’s revolutionary promises or his past and current behavior lead us to believe he will willingly submit to historical norms. He will violate the Constitution from the minute he takes office, and appears to be ready to trample historical norms even more extremely than the radicals running the Congressional branches.
It’s possible that Robin will be proven more right than wrong in these speculations, but he ignores too much evidence before us to persuade me.
There didn’t even tackle the question — which I take was “how did Trump beat Clinton” — from similar perspectives and focus. Robin is often insightful and observant, but his and Hanson’s pieces were offered nothing new and were further marred by use of historically inaccurate or distorted information to make their points. Fore example, Robin contrasted Trump’s popular vote percentage with that of reelection numbers for prior presidents. Therefore, Nixon’s ’68 percentage (43.4%) and not his ’72 numbers is the proper comparison. The ’76 primary was nothing like what Robin described other than a late attempt to try and stop him. (Same was true in ’68 with Nixon.)
(Residents of Sparta didn’t have “reality” TV and twitter. Or books or literacy. Yet, for Hanson, rural folks are just the same as they ever were.)
At least when I post what you view as garbage, it doesn’t take more than a minute or so to read it and draw one’s own conclusion. These two pieces were a waste of many more minutes each.
May owe you an acknowledgement about that Kurt Eichenwald story; it has been disputed by some sources and may turn out to be bogus as you claimed.
I think they’re looking through entirely different periscopes. Hanson/Historian is looking at the electorate, and sees the eternal country mouse-city mouse polarization.
Robin is looking at personalities, circumstances and philosophies.
I don’t see any prospective philosophy in Trump. One will, of course, construct one retrospectively, assuming we’re still around to do so, but Trump works from engagement, not from any thought out plan beyond his personal inclinations and what the thinks will sell.
Salesmanism maybe. Ferenginism. The Rules of Acquisition.