RSSWhy Mitt Romney is not a Statesman
Occasionally you hear people say that we should elect more successful businessmen to public office. After all, the government is so inefficient. If a private sector company ran like the government, it would go bankrupt. Why not elect effective businessmen? This is a peculiarly American phenomenon.
The problem is that businessmen make lousy statesman. In Vision of Order Richard Weaver quotes Professor Elijah Jordan’s Business Be Damned to describe the mentality of the business class:
“In business intelligent and serious interpretation of facts is never called for; intelligence is not involved at all. Only the individual with the strongest motives, motives least checked by moral sensitiveness, can survive. The psychological make-up of the business “mind” is therefore a mere collection of disconnected motives, impulses entirely without conscious direction of moral unity of purpose, hence without intelligence. A “decision” of such a mind is merely the triumph of one motive, the worst, over the rest particularly over any impulse to sympathetic appreciation of another’s stake in the situation. The latter impulse is “inefficiency.” (Visions of Order, pg. 32).
Weaver considers the victory of the businessmen and managers to be a byproduct of “Yankee” industrialism. He notes, “Indeed, it has often been mentioned that the Civil War, which secured the North hegemony over the Union, put an end to the leadership of the minister and the lawyer, whose status involved some degree of cultural attainment, and replaced it with that of the business entrepreneur.” (pg. 32)
How shocking it is that the head of the American Conservative Union and the movement’s chief intellectual magazine forget the wisdom of Weaver and endorse such an archetypal unprincipled candidate of commercialism. Are they trying to conserve materialism? Give me Paul, Huckabee, or even McCain any day. (Although I suppose Mitt is to be preferred to Ill Duce… I mean Hizzonor.
GAS
January 9th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Let me tag onto that by adding a quote from Jean Yarbourgh in, “The Forgotten T.R. - Reconsiderations- Theodore Roosevelt:
“The manly virtues
Part of the fascination with Roosevelt has always been his larger-than-life personality. A child of established wealth who found glory in cultivating the “iron” virtues of a sterner era, Roosevelt had nothing but contempt for the Gilded Age, when capitalist entrepreneurs such as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie far outshone the second-rate politicians of the day. “Purely commercial ideals,” Roosevelt wrote, were “mean and sordid,” producing weak and fearful men, “incapable of the thrill of generous emotion,” and lacking in the capacity for nobility and greatness… A frank advocate of America n power, he led the construction of the Panama Canal and sent the Navy around the world for the first time. His energy seemed never to flag. He shot big game in Africa, explored the then-uncharted Amazon River, and fathered many healthy children, delighting in their antics.
These aspects of Roosevelt’s life have enduring appeal. But there are also significant parallels between his time and ours that help to explain his popularity today. The closing decades of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were periods of enormous wealth creation and consolidation. In T.R.’s day, these tendencies prompted worries about the power of money and special interests to corrupt republican government, and the disinclination of the nation’s leading citizens to do anything about it. Well-bred young men from respectable families regarded the rough and tumble of democratic politics as beneath them. In the decades following the Civil War, few men of the upper class concerned themselves with politics at all, and those who did were mostly, in Roosevelt’s words, “well-meaning little men, with receding chins and small feet,” zealous and idealistic, but totally ineffectual. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt memorably described them, they were “dudes that part their names in the middle.”"