Another cult

The Cato Institute is promoting Gene Healy's book The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. He writes in a mass email:

Americans have come to see the president as a figure responsible for solving all our problems and fulfilling all our hopes and dreams. Is it any wonder then that the presidency has burst its constitutional bonds and grown powerful enough to threaten
American liberty?

Using historical scholarship, legal analysis, and cultural commentary, my book traces the growth of the Imperial Presidency over the course of the 20th century, showing how the Imperial Presidency has been a regularly recurring feature of American life for nearly a century. George W. Bush has, in short, followed a path marked out by history’s ‘great’ presidents.

Why pick on just the 20th century? Activist presidents like Jefferson (Louisiana Purchase), Jackson (Indian "removal"), Lincoln (Civil War), and Grant (Reconstruction) -- and their worshippers -- are all over the 19th century.

I'm curious enough to ask, but probably not curious enough to actually read the book: does Healy confront the problem that sometimes liberties conflict? The "rights" to secede and to hold black people in bondage were surely infringed by activist presidents, but allowing those "liberties" probably would have hindered the expansion of corporate capitalism across a large uniformly governed area. If Healy is expounding an actual political philosophy and not just playing ventriloquist's dummy for a certain portion of the upper crust, he'll produce a rationale that goes beyond just hating on the New Deal.

Barry bounces so you can too

About five years ago I wrote about Barry Moltz, an author/entrepreneur with an uncharacteristic kind of business book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business. Now I'm the wannabe entrepreneur and he's back with a new book, Bounce! Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success.

It's NOT a comeback book. Moltz is still in the business of telling truths that don't fit in the narrow intellectual confines of your usual business or motivational talk. Failure happens. Failure isn't always educational. It often isn't even your fault.

There are plenty of times when dead-end failure just plain stinks, and you can't pretty it up or minimize the pain by ferreting out something of value from the mess.

My third company once lost its largest company because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) caught them stealing. Another time, I lost my best employee because her spouse took a new job 1,000 miles away. There wasn't much new for me to learn from either of these situations that I didn't already know. {8}

Since a lot of bad things just happen, and since business theology is no better at making them nice than regular theology is, you need to develop the resilience to live through failure and bounce back. Moltz's book is modeled on rubber-band balls he created as a kid: he suggests ten "bands" to add to yours so you too can bounce better when it's required. Sounds like a book that should be on the list of a lot of current, former, and soon-to-be-former journalists, for starters.

Rick Perlstein

My profile of the author of Before the Storm and the forthcoming Nixonland is in this week's Chicago Reader. If you'd rather read excerpts, Digby has some.

Paleos try to annex Wendell Berry

Scott Richert represents the paleo kind of conservatives, those who realize that capitalism is not their friend. Writing in The University Bookman (h/t Jameson Campaigne), he gives a friendly review to Eric Freyfogle (a University of Illinois law professor who has long argued that the environmental crisis requires a rethinking of private property rights in a more communal direction) and to a collection of essays about the Kentucky agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry.

Berry has long escaped partisan categorization (over the years he's been featured in Mother Jones and Mother Earth News) and the paleos' clumsy efforts to appropriate him as some kind of conservative Catholic are a stretch that would be funny if Richert weren't so invincibly earnest. There seems to be a boom in books by and about Berry these days, and I'll be interested to see if any of them can take him on his own idiosyncratic terms, horse farming and all, without trying to assimilate him into traditions (like Catholicism) that are many thousands of years younger than his agrarianism.

Business schools, a history

As someone who's spent some time arguing that journalism isn't a profession, I'm intrigued to run across a book that apparently makes a similar argument about management. Writing in Teachers College Record, James O'Toole of the University of Denver reviews Rakesh Khurana's From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Here's O'Toole's lead:

When prominent doctors, lawyers, and journalists are caught betraying the ethics of their respective professions, it is their peers in the medical, legal, and media communities who typically are the first to condemn their behavior. In sharp contrast, the collective silence of American business leaders was deafening during the Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Tyco and other turn-of-the-millennium corporate scandals. Nary a CEO spoke out publicly against the illegal and unethical practices of the likes of Messrs. Lay, Kozlowski, et al. Instead, as Federal Express’s CEO Fred Smith recently admitted to BusinessWeek, he and his fellow executives decided 'to lay low' until the storm blew over.

Dang! I may have to add this institutional history of business schools (of all things!) to my reading list.

Mixing god and politics: toxic cocktail?

Kevin Coe, a doctoral student in speech communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has just coauthored with David Scott Domke The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. I haven't read it but I'm skittish about newly discovered watersheds, like their claim that things changed profoundly in 1980. Meanwhile he has some interesting thoughts on it here:

"What the omnipresence of the God strategy has created is a de facto religious test. ...We've created an environment that essentially excludes those who feel that faith is a deeply private matter, those who believe that religion can be practiced without being preached, those who observe a faith other than Christianity, and those who choose not to believe in a higher power. That environment is not good for democracy, nor is it good for religion."

Blast from the past

Why is it that two of the best books about Presidential campaigns came out of the 1972 election, which resulted in the election of two criminals (Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew)? Rick Perlstein reminded me of The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse, which contains some observations that seem like they could've been written yesterday:

Reporters, especially campaign reporters, had no mandate to explore the past; recent history was just so much stale news. The story lay in the present. {300}

Journalism is probably the slowest-moving, most tradition-bound profession [sic] in America. It refuses to budge until it is shoved into the future by some irresistible external force. {321}

The other great one, of course, is the late Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

The denialists you will always have with you

Reading up on the past I keep running into the present. In Indiana History: A Book of Readings, I came across the memoirs of Oliver H. Smith, including the story of the turning point in his run for Congress in 1826. His opponent, Judge John Test, inadvertently aroused the wrath of the same wingnut intelligentsia that takes pride in (a) debunking, and (b) not reading about climate change today:

We met in Allenville, Switzerland county, on one occasion. The whole country was there. The judge was speaking, and for the first time introduced the new subject of railroads. He avowed himself in favor of them, and said he had voted for the Buffalo and New Orleans road, and then rising to the top of his voice, 'I tell you, fellow-citizens, that in England they run the cars thirty miles an hour, and they will yet be run at a higher speed in America.' This was enough. The crowd set up a loud laugh at the expense of the judge. An old fellow, standing by me, bawled out, 'You are crazy, or do you think we are all fools; a man could not live a moment at that speed.' {103}