The last thing the tea party movement has respect for is careful and challenging thought, for skeptics as distinct from "true believers." And that's what we have in our president, writes Harvard historian, James Kloppenberg. A thinker, a challenger, a skeptic, a dreaded intellectual. Kloppenberg is almost surely right.
President Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.
(By the way, and impossible though it may seem, I personally know some intellectuals to be hiding out at UCLA, CUNY, the University of Texas, Berkeley, Chicago and even (god help us!), Gainesville, Orono, and Penn State.)
In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.
“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.
To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.
Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said. ...NYT
All of those great presidents are hated by some faction or other. "Everyone loved Ronald Reagan" turns out to be a sad, if true, measure of his years in office. Reagan flunked. The intensity of the hate towards Obama may, on the other hand, turn out to be a predictor of his greatness.
After all, that group of philospher presidents all had hate groups shouting at them. Adams was very much disliked by both Jefferson and Hamilton (though they managed to get along later). His son, John Quincy Adams, was detested by the Federalists (though he had been one). Jefferson is hated by many to this day. Lincoln was hated mostly by, but by no means exclusively by, the South . You can hear hate talk about Woodrow Wilson to this day -- one of his flag-bearing haters is Glenn Beck (which is surely a feather in Wilson's cap!).
Ideologues at both ends of the narrowing spectrum of American political philosophy are angry at Obama. Pragmatism annoys people who are sure they're right. Compromise, of course, is not a sin of the despised centrist. Rather, it's a sign of faith in social democracy that pops up in individuals right across the spectrum.
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Speaking of ideologues v. democracy, I just watched the You Tube video of the head-stomping incident at the Ron Paul rally. Fact is, he didn't stomp her head in a childish rage. It was more sinister than that. He placed his foot quite carefully across her easily snappable neck. I think that guy needs -- badly -- to be taken out of circulation.
