05-10-2017, 01:55 PM
In view of the generational cycle, I 'm beginning to think that President Trump is doing something positive, if without intention -- by showing how to do so many things wrong and to show the consequences of such, that he is setting up the next President -- someone better than any President since FDR (sorry, President Obama!) who gets away with being a great President in the time that quality matters more than partisanship and identity. The generational cycle can work that way. Maybe it took the forgettable figures of the time of the French and Indian War to set up the principled leadership of the American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. Maybe it took the awful Presidencies of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan to make Lincoln look good as a prospective leader. Maybe it took the twelve-year disaster of Harding/Coolidge/Hoover to make FDR presentable. Obama, good as he was, may have simply delayed the Crisis; he certainly was not the one to set up a Lincoln or FDR and he was not that great. Obama reminds me of the sort of leadership that a country usually gets after a Crisis is decisively over -- the mature Reactive like Truman or Eisenhower.
We have had a very good President sandwiched between two of the worst in American history (Dubya looks good in contrast to Trump, but that isn't saying much)... but even if we end up with an Obama-like President following Trump, we are likely to give him more of a chance than we as a nation gave Obama. That will be the difference between an Obama... and a Lincoln or FDR. Of course, if the political institutions that we have are ripped asunder and must be remade we might end up with another Washington. Obama's personality with the cloak of military success?
We have had a very good President sandwiched between two of the worst in American history (Dubya looks good in contrast to Trump, but that isn't saying much)... but even if we end up with an Obama-like President following Trump, we are likely to give him more of a chance than we as a nation gave Obama. That will be the difference between an Obama... and a Lincoln or FDR. Of course, if the political institutions that we have are ripped asunder and must be remade we might end up with another Washington. Obama's personality with the cloak of military success?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.