Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a Democratic United States Senator from New York, an academic, an ambassador to the United Nations, but he is best remembered as an adviser to Richard Nixon.
Like many academics, he seemed happiest when he didn't have to do anything to accomplish change but could simply write a paper and watch the person or people in power execute his advice.
Nixon, like Trump, was not a deep thinker, a policy wonk.
It is said there are 3 types of Congressmen: pot hole fillers, politicians, policy wonks, which is to say people who do constituent services, people who only care about getting re elected and people who like the idea of manipulating rules and systems to achieve big goals.
This applies to Presidents as well. Nixon and Trump clearly had no real interest in anything but staying in power and getting re elected.
So, it is natural that the President would put in place some people to tell him what to think and what to do.
In 1968 Moynihan was writing memos about the problem of global warming and CO2 emissions and burning fossil fuels.
He also wrote the famous memo, promptly leaked to the press, about "benign neglect" in the case of racial relations. What he actually was saying is there had already been too much said about race, that it began and ended every discussion and enough already!
Reading his memos to Nixon one sees the gauche pandering to a damaged ego, a friendly therapist who knows he is dealing with a fragile psyche he is being careful to bring along.
But the big take home is how very much more volatile and tumultuous the 1960's and 1970's were than what we have now with the Trumpling. American soldiers were coming home in body bags, or limbless, and were murdering Vietnamese villagers, women and babies at Mylai; demonstrations were drawing hundreds of thousands; National Guardsmen murdered 4 students on a college campus; large parts of the inner cities were being burned down; white racist Southerners were murdering white Freedom Riders and black people; women were still not advancing in the workplace.
Compared to all that, the Trumpling is merely a malodorous cloud of gas emanating from the hind parts of a dyspeptic and flatulent nation.
Like many academics, he seemed happiest when he didn't have to do anything to accomplish change but could simply write a paper and watch the person or people in power execute his advice.
Nixon, like Trump, was not a deep thinker, a policy wonk.
It is said there are 3 types of Congressmen: pot hole fillers, politicians, policy wonks, which is to say people who do constituent services, people who only care about getting re elected and people who like the idea of manipulating rules and systems to achieve big goals.
This applies to Presidents as well. Nixon and Trump clearly had no real interest in anything but staying in power and getting re elected.
So, it is natural that the President would put in place some people to tell him what to think and what to do.
In 1968 Moynihan was writing memos about the problem of global warming and CO2 emissions and burning fossil fuels.
He also wrote the famous memo, promptly leaked to the press, about "benign neglect" in the case of racial relations. What he actually was saying is there had already been too much said about race, that it began and ended every discussion and enough already!
Reading his memos to Nixon one sees the gauche pandering to a damaged ego, a friendly therapist who knows he is dealing with a fragile psyche he is being careful to bring along.
But the big take home is how very much more volatile and tumultuous the 1960's and 1970's were than what we have now with the Trumpling. American soldiers were coming home in body bags, or limbless, and were murdering Vietnamese villagers, women and babies at Mylai; demonstrations were drawing hundreds of thousands; National Guardsmen murdered 4 students on a college campus; large parts of the inner cities were being burned down; white racist Southerners were murdering white Freedom Riders and black people; women were still not advancing in the workplace.
Compared to all that, the Trumpling is merely a malodorous cloud of gas emanating from the hind parts of a dyspeptic and flatulent nation.
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