Amor Mundi, July 24th 2016 - #100in10 Edition
07-24-2016Arendt vs. Trump (and Schmitt)
“Listening to Donald J. Trump’s acceptance speech, I felt as though the election was turning into a battle between two very different, though equally formidable, 20th-century political philosophers, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced,” Schmitt wrote in his 1927 work, “The Concept of the Political,” “is that between friend and enemy.” It is a statement meant to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive: The friend-enemy distinction is central to politics in the same way that a good-evil distinction is central to ethics and a beautiful-ugly distinction is central to aesthetics. All other considerations are peripheral to this core concern.”Schmitt’s “friend and enemy” distinction is the basis of his understanding of politics as a contest between conflicting groups or tribes. Schmitt sees it as realist counsel to understand that politics is about groups fighting other groups. To win and succeed, any political unity must be willing to sacrifice and fight for itself and against other groups. A political order for Schmitt is not a matter of laws that treat all people equally. When we mistake legality for politics, Schmitt argues, we weaken the friend/enemy distinction and the bonds of unity amongst friends in opposition to enemies that is the core of politics. Politics is the expression of the truth of a people in opposition to its enemies; and the Schmittian political dictator is the one gifted with the ability to speak for the people in a way that unifies and brings that people to exist. Trumps “I am your voice” is a true example of a Schmittian political dictator. Continue on Medium... Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/opinion/trumps-perilous-nation.html
The President Who Would Not Read
Tony Schwartz is the ghostwriter who wrote Donald J. Trump’s memoir, The Art of the Deal. Trump often references his book to explain his leadership style, and I have turned to The Art of the Deal to try to understand Trump and how he might govern. Now Jane Mayer reports that Schwartz made up much of what he wrote in The Art of the Deal. Schwartz tells Mayer that ““I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”” Schwartz worries that “if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” And Mayer writes: “If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.””
“In those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters, offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump had been forthcoming with him during the New York interview, but it hadn’t required much time or deep reflection. For the book, though, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting. Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial. “Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said. In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his announcement, he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.” But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment. Other journalists have noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other than the Bible or “The Art of the Deal.” Trump picked the 1929 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Evidently suspecting that many years had elapsed since he’d read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent book he’d read. “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time,” Trump said. As The New Republic noted recently, this attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama, a habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who reportedly engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with his political adviser Karl Rove.”Form more information visit: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
Scarce Intellectuals
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft struggles to understand that weird and at times unctuous beast, the public intellectual; to do so, he turns to one of the few real examples we have of an intellectual who thought and wrote in public - Hannah Arendt.
“Few people better embody the virtues commonly associated with the “public intellectual” than the German Jewish political theorist (and frequent Partisan Review contributor) Hannah Arendt, best known for her responses to the rise of totalitarianism, the forced desegregation of American schools, and the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann. And yet Arendt often used the term “intellectual” with scorn. She never accepted the idea that specialized education provided political wisdom, nor was she invested in the fantasy that the public would be won over by superior arguments or share some professional thinkers’ disinterested love of truth. In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Arendt rejected the idea that politics would be improved by the presence of expert opinions. Furthermore, she described intellectuals, as a class, in strikingly critical terms, as creatures of the marketplace for whom that market mattered much more than the life of the mind; they used their skills primarily to earn their bread — “only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living” — and felt none of the anguish that true artists might feel while in the throes of creation. This was not really their fault; the conditions of modernity themselves force us to emphasize our “usefulness,” and to glorify intellectual life as a form of labor, if indeed this can be called glory. Five years later, in her 1963 study On Revolution, Arendt once again characterized “intellectuals” as individuals who instrumentalized education; they found nothing in their mental lives, in other words, to transport them beyond the means-ends world whose pointlessness Wordsworth once described with the line “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”Form more information visit: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thinking-public-private-intellectuals-time-public/#!