Every Four Years, An Exercise in Futility
Why America’s Presidential Elections Miss the Point
by Louis René Beres (June 2015)
Could such refined leadership expectations have been any more obvious, or any less controversial?
As Americans, we need to ask this vital question about our own country. Indeed, soon facing another quadrennial round of presidential elections, we should inquire: Why has the United States steered so distressingly far from this commendable leadership mark?
[1]
At the most genuinely basic level of our national existence, no identifiable presidential aspirant can hope to slow the excruciatingly breathless rhythms of our machine-like national existence. Is this incapacity a tolerable state of affairs?
No honest and capable presidential contender should ever promise otherwise. What ought to be promised is a tactically realistic strategy to stave off certain expected enemy harms for as long as necessary. In the end, this means a commitment based upon substantially complex calculations, assessments that are fundamentally intellectual, not merely political. Can any American seriously believe that one or another of the current candidates, Democrat or Republican, would be capable of rendering such exceedingly difficult calculations?
Always, in presidential politics, it is easy to be heroic with the lives of others, especially with eager and well-intentioned young men and women who are still too young to rise above the most primal or aboriginal forms of patriotism. Whether the endlessly simplistic pleas for greater force are applied to Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, their political origins are always the same. Inevitably, they are the product of a persistently core failure to envision modern war as a broadly civilizational rather than narrowly military endeavor.
Ironically, long ago, the Chinese strategist, Sun-Tzu, and, later, the Prussian military thinker, Carl von Clausewitz, had known all this. Already, their informed insights were in advance of where our core strategic thinking lies today.
Exeunt omnes?
Once, many of our national heroes, including those who could read real books, by themselves, were created by tangible achievement. Today, however, the successful American politician is fashioned exclusively by manipulation and invention. Here, via glaringly sophisticated and closely-intersecting systems of advertisement, an industry for profit effectively preempts any promising public choice. Now, in short, our national leaders are created by an openly shabby process that is intentionally refractory to both intelligence and judgment.
In electing a president, when will we Americans finally learn to look behind the news? When will we learn to acknowledge that our pitifully flimsy political world has been constructed upon ashes, and that ashes mean something significant? The answer is not all that difficult to grasp.
Not until we learn to take ourselves seriously as persons.
Not until we begin to read and think seriously, with clarity and sincerity.
Not until we stop amusing ourselves to death with grotesque and corrupting entertainments.
Not until we begin to seek rapport with genuine and universal feelings of mutuality and caring.
Not until we can restore all levels of education to the dignified grace of real learning. For now, the life of the mind in America reveals a short and skeletal existence, even in universities.
What we require, in our young people especially, is not more chief executive officers, marketing managers, venture capitalists, social networking entrepreneurs, or rocket scientists. Desperately, instead, we need more high-thinking individuals, not high net worth members.
[1] Professor Beres is the author of some of the very earliest major books on nuclear terrorism, including Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat (1979), and Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (1980). ____________________________________ To comment on this article, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish interesting and insightful articles such as this, please click here. If you have enjoyed this article by Louis René Beres and want to read more of his work, please click here. Louis René Beres contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all his contributions, on which comments are welcome.