We’ve clearly had a failure of leadership in this country.
.. But what’s the nature of that failure? The leading theory is that it’s the corruption
.. Another theory has to do with insularity: The elites spend so much time within the Acela corridor that they don’t have a clue about what is going on beyond it.
.. A career is a job you do as long as the benefits outweigh the costs; a vocation involves falling in love with something, having a conviction about it and making it part of your personal identity.
.. Mitt Romney seems to be an exceptionally fine person, but when he was campaigning his true nature was often hidden under a film of political formulas.
.. The careerist mentality frequently makes politicians timid, driven more by fear of failure than by any positive ideal.
.. They rationalize that, since the opposition is so evil, anything that serves their career serves the country.
.. People with a vocation mind-set have their eyes fixed on the long game. They are willing to throw themselves toward their goals imaginatively, boldly and remorselessly.
Stephen Bannon, a Rookie Campaign Chief Who ‘Loves the Fight’
advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.
.. “Steve is a fighter. He loves the fight. He loves the scrum,”
.. Mr. Bannon, 62, who grew up in a Democratic family in Virginia that fled the party in favor of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order Republicanism
.. He made movies that lionized Sarah Palin and vilified the Occupy Wall Street movement as fraudulent rebels backed by well-off liberals.
.. Mr. Bannon, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has made little secret of his desire to frighten Americans out of complacency, fusing relentless provocation and a hodgepodge of conservative ideas to make the case for rebellion against the political order.
.. “Fear is a good thing,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Fear is going to lead you to take action.”
.. Breitbart received 18.3 million unique visitors in July
.. The site has outpaced conservative rivals like The Daily Caller, and Breitbart executives say that monthly traffic has increased by 16 times since the year Mr. Bannon took over.
.. “There are very few people who have dealt with Steve Bannon who have not been cursed at,”
By Making A Game Out Of Rejection, A Man Conquers Fear (Invisibilia)
This segment of the show explores how a man decided to conquer his fear of rejection by getting rejected every day — on purpose.
2016 The Two Speeches That Explain American Politics Right Now
But if you want to understand the gulf between the two conventions and the two parties in just two speeches, you should watch Republican Rudy Giuliani’s fiery stem-winder in Cleveland and then Democrat Cory Booker’s exuberant address in Philadelphia. Giuliani, a 72-year-old white man who stepped down as mayor of New York 15 years ago, outlined a dark vision of fear and fury. Booker, a 47-year-old black man who is now a senator from New Jersey, delivered an optimistic message of love and togetherness.
.. For the Republicans in Cleveland, that mood was scared and angry—and more precisely, angry about being scared. And the Giuliani New Yorkers remember as a moderate who was progressive on social issues and immigration and once endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor was nowhere to be found. He began his speech with a blunt description of a nation traumatized by out-of-control crime and a constant threat of terrorism, his voice rising with every sentence: “The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for their police officers, who are being TARGETED!”
.. Booker took it even further into New Age hippie-talk, arguing that the ultimate patriotic American value is not mere tolerance but actual love. “You can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and countrywomen,” he said. “We don’t always have to agree, but we must be there for each other, we must empower each other, we must find common ground.” Love, he said, is even a source of national security. “Love recognizes that we need each other, that we as a nation are better together, that when we are divided we are weak, yet when we are united, we are strong.” Even in the depths of the Civil War, Booker reminded the cheering crowd, Abraham Lincoln promised “malice towards none and charity towards all.”
.. This was another big theme in Cleveland, the notion that Trump will destroy ISIS, balance the budget, and Make America Great Again through his own sheer strength of will
.. But he worked himself into a frenzy over his desire to obliterate Muslim extremists: “You know who you are! AND WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU!!!”
There was nothing subtle or touchy-feely about Giuliani’s rhetoric. He was making an emotional call to arms, a daddy-party appeal to a frightened public. The closest he came to a policy argument was attacking Clinton’s willingness to accept Syrian refugees in the United States: “They’re going to come here and kill us!”
.. The Republicans are portraying America as a massive crime scene, even though violent crime is actually down nationwide, and terrorism as the catastrophe of our time, even though terrorists kill fewer Americans every year than lightning strikes.
.. Trump is an extraordinarily unorthodox candidate, but the implication of his candidacy is that desperate times call for unusual approaches. He has described Obama’s America in remarkably apocalyptic terms, and Giuliani set the tone in Cleveland by describing 2016 as the last chance to stop Obama-ism.
.. That was the heart of the Republican argument in Cleveland, that America is collapsing, and that Trump is the only hope to restore its greatness.