Politics

Rule-Follower, Wrong Job It may be that nobody wanted to be president less than Taft. “I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.” Everybody knows the type: the boy who would tattle in every class, who sticks to rules even when they don’t quite fit, honest to a fault and unwilling to bend even when a bit of finesse would make life easier. That’s Taft. The book makes clear that for two men who agreed almost entirely on policy, you could hardly find personalities more different than Taft and Roosevelt. It’s no surprise their partnership broke under the strain; one thrived on combat and theater, the other on procedure and order. ...

** Press president, buried by press ** This biography makes you root for Harding as a person more than most presidents. The author’s core project—rehabilitating a reputation long distorted by headlines rather than historians—largely works. It helps that the scandals that came to define him erupted after his death and never actually involved him. Yet for a century the narrative stuck, a reminder that journalism can outshine history, whether for good or ill. ...

** The History Scholar Who Lost History ** There are few presidents whose stories read like tragedies: Lincoln, Nixon, LBJ. Woodrow Wilson is one of them. What should have been his culminating achievement died on the vine, and for his impact on history, he died with it. Wilson’s arc—from lawyer to immensely successful academic to successful politician—commands respect. He stands with Obama in a field of the most academic presidents. His legislative record before WWI is something history usually forgets, as is his vision of the president as prime minister. Cooper’s biography does a great job detailing just how much America tried to stay out of WWI, and how Wilson is much less passive than biographies from Theodore Roosevelt’s perspective make him out to be. ...

This isn’t Robert Caro, but it’s still pretty good. Truman is probably the most relatable president I’ve read about. And as we enter into the twilight of Pax Americana, it’s poignant to read about the person who laid the cornerstones of it.

TBW

** What is Love Justice? (baby don’t ask me… no more) ** For the impact that Plato has on modern western thought, I had higher hopes. Frankly if philosophy is simply footnotes to Plato then this is a series of dinner conversations I can skip. The Republic meanders through linguistics, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, hitting a bingo’s worth of liberal art subjects in a few long soliloquies. Plato uses a fictional Socrates to (maybe?) make his point, but the dialog style wears thin quicker than plowing through lineages from the old testament. What I thought was a method to ask thought provoking questions to inspire learning in the listener is instead related as a sequence of info-dumps or logical leaps followed by rhetorical questions, followed by one-word affirmations. ...

** History’s Finest Bureaucrat ** 冷静观察，站稳脚跟，沉着应付，韬光养晦，善于守拙，绝不当头，有所作为 Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership. Amazing that there isn’t more written about Deng, doubly amazing that this serves as the authoritative account both in english and in Chinese (see: Chinese Goodreads Link) minus a full retelling of June 4th 1989. More to come.

** Competent is Good Enough ** In special effects, faces are the hardest to passably recreate. This is because the human brain, through eons of evolution is trained to catch the nuances and twitches of every muscle, pore and stretch mark. When it comes to fiction, court politics are the equivalent of faces. Simple enough from the outside, but it turns out our evolutionary proclivity towards family-based power structures and small group social dynamics means that it’s easy to spot a fake in the uncanny valley. ...

** 13th book of 2021: Director’s Cut ** Most of us suspect that we are pawns in a larger game. For me, the only advantage of working in the State Department was unambiguous evidence of pawn-status. So from my vantage point beneath 8 layers of bureaucracy, it was never quite clear what game Obama was playing at. Even with secret briefings and Ambassadorial brunches, information wasn’t available from within. Media coverage was (and is) useless, and contemporary books such as ‘Obama’s Wars’ took scraps of meeting notes and tried to assemble a cogent narrative. ...

54th book of 2020. ** tl;dr: ** Read the cover, read the appendix, skip the rest. ‘Destined for War’ introduces the Thucydides trap, named after Thucydides’ recording of the war between Sparta and Athens. In this pattern, rising powers (e.g. Athens) can end up at war with dominant powers (e.g. Sparta) even though the outcome is against the interests of both parties. According to Graham, in 12/16 cases over the last 500 years, similar shifts in power balance have led to war. The book relies on practical history, using past examples to try predict future events. Indeed, this method seems to be the most effective means at predicting political outcomes, and is so simple that it’s baffling we don’t see more of it. Tetlock’s book on political predictions has good evidence on how this method is one of the best ways to make predictions about complex systems (i.e. politics), with repeatably better outcomes than what specific expertise (i.e. professors at Harvard) can achieve. ...