Nov 16 2011
This week’s Coffee & Markets podcast features Mary Ann Glendon, author of The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. We discussed the intersection of politics and theory through the eyes of some famous examples and what this means for the public square today.
Oct 26 2011
This week Pejman and I spoke with Ian Morris, author of Why the West Rules – For Now, about how geography helps significantly shape destiny, how it explains the rise of the China, and the possibility that it may overtake the West. Listen below.
.
Oct 7 2011
There is a tendency by some to look down their noses at politics; viewing it as the grubby fight for power and the inevitable disappointment that results from politicians who promise everything during election years only to deliver hot air and favors for friends once safely ensconced in office. To be fair, all too often this is what politics actually offers.
But in his biography of founding father James Madison, Richard Brookhiser argues that politics is the working out of our ideals; that for freedom, democracy and republican government to function in the real world requires politics and all the baggage that entails.
We pay much less attention to James Madison, Father of Politics, than we do James Madison, Father of the Constitution. That is because politics embarrasses us. Politics is the spectacle on television and YouTube, the daily perp walk on the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report. Surely our founders and framers lefts us something better, more solid, more inspiring than that? They did. But they all knew - and Madison understood better than any of them – that ideals come to life in dozens of political transactions every day. Some of these transactions aren’t pretty. You can understand this and try to work with this knowledge, or you can look away. But ignoring politics will not make it stop. It will simply go on without you – and sooner or later will happen to you.
Madison is one of, if not the, smartest of the founders but he lacked the stature of Washington, or the eloquence of a Thomas Jefferson or a Patrick Henry, and so his intelligence is sometimes overlooked. Madison may not have been an eloquent speaker – he often spoke so quietly that the audience couldn’t hear him – or writer but he learned to master many of the important skills necessary to move public opinion, pass legislation and build coalitions.
