Seeing Calvin Coolidge as a Dream
John Derbyshire, author of, among other things, a very fine novel on a Chinese emigre’s obsession with our most Taoist of presidents, reviews Cult of the Presidency today on NRO. He likes it, and quotes from it liberally. Riffing off the book’s discussion of sycophantic White House staffers, he writes:
I have not so far heard that White House functionaries walk backwards away from the Presidential Presence, as is done in the royal courts of Britain and Japan, or get down on their knees and knock their heads on the floor in a full formal kowtow, as was the rule in Imperial China, but surely such protocols cannot be many years away.
That republican manners have decayed to a level of servility that would have embarrassed Elagabalus, is bad enough. That modern conservatives have accepted, even helped enable the process, is very depressing indeed. The belief in existential danger is no excuse. Even if we are all going to be murdered by fanatical terrorists, which I don’t for a moment believe, let’s at least die like free citizens of a free republic.
Derbyshire also writes
The thing most painful to recall is that when George W. Bush was running for the presidency in 2000, many of us believed and hoped that he would be an inconsequential president in the style of those bewhiskered late 19th-century snoozers. Bush’s affable mediocrity seemed well suited to another long spell of peace and prosperity.
I know exactly what he means. Part of me thinks there’s an alternate universe somewhere where the Twin Towers are standing, and George W. Bush became the sort of president about whom you could say, as Mencken did of Coolidge “he had no ideas and was not a nuisance”–that is, a great president.
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