Submitted By: Mike Spindell. Guest Blogger
Mythology can be seen as the social glue of diverse groups. It is the accumulation of tales, beliefs, moral strictures and mores that gives a specific population a sense of homogeneity, allowing it to exist with synergy. This is true of nations, ethnic groups, religions and even political movements. One of the defining conditions in our nation is that we are one of the most diverse on this planet when it comes to religions and ethnicities. All of our original thirteen states came into existence via individual peculiarities of settlers, religious sects, slavery, climate and the spoils system of colonialism. About a third of the citizens of those thirteen colonies, of the nascent United States, chafed under foreign domination and engendered a rebellion against the British Empire’s exploitation. Among that fractional populace, there fortunately resided a group of the colonies wealthiest citizens and greatest minds. The rebellion succeeded and a decade later a government emerged created by the novelty of a Constitution delineating how it was to be run.
As improbable as the rebellion against the world’s greatest power might have seemed, the ongoing success of this enterprise is even more of an improbability. From the beginning most citizens saw themselves as attached more to their individual states, than to the Federal Government. The subsequent history of this country is well-known, but what I think often gets missed is that the history as we know it is mostly a creation of an American mythology, which has given consistency to this diverse enterprise and served to inculcate waves of immigrants into seeing themselves as part of America. While a nation’s mythology may serve it as “social glue” it can also contain within it seeds of social dysfunction. What follows is my take on the American Myth of the “Rugged Individualist” and why though it may have had initial utilitarian value; it has become cancerous within our country and may lead to the disintegration of America as we know it.
The initial inspiration for this piece came from this source: http://www.nationofchange.org/right-s-sham-religion-rugged-individualism-1355328952 and it is an article well worth reading. Robert Becker’s OpEd in The Nation of Change “The Right’s Sham Religion of Rugged Individualism” presents an excellent short essay. Rather than sprinkle this essay with quotations I urge you to read it, while I spin off in a less political direction. The study of Mythology in the tradition of Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, Sir James George Frazer and Richard Slotkin has been a lifelong avocation of mine. Using Mr. Becker’s article as a kind of muse, I will look at “rugged individualism” from my synthesis of the ideas I’ve absorbed through the years. I first touched on this theme on 7/22/11 in this guest blog: http://jonathanturley.org/2011/07/23/the-american-quest-for-empire/#more-37487 and it is an insight that influences much of the way I view America’s current situation.
“Rugged Individualism definition:
The belief that all individuals, or nearly all individuals, can succeed on their own and that government help for people should be minimal. The phrase is often associated with policies of the Republican party and was widely used by the Republican president Herbert Hoover. The phrase was later used in scorn by the Democratic presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman to refer to the disasters of Hoover’s administration, during which the stock market Crash of 1929 occurred and the Great Depression began.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rugged+individualism
While it is true that Herbert Hoover is given credit for the coinage and usage of the words “rugged individualism”, in my view the concept and connotation of these words goes further back into American history as a mythological theme. With the advent of the “Social Darwinist” philosophical movement, that “pseudo-science” lent credence to the concept and helped blend it into the common wisdom of the country.
One way to view history is from a conspiratorial perspective. While I do think there have been many conspiracy’s that have indeed influenced the course of human events, I think that to view them as the result of evil cabals plotting their execution is to be naive as to the way we humans act and think. It is certainly true that the NAZI’s in Germany and the Communists in the USSR, conspired to gain power and then used propaganda to create national mythologies that were ultimately destructive in nature. Similarly, FDR’s Administration used ideology, and mythology to create propaganda to defend against these foreign forces. My thinking is that propaganda and its creator’s, no matter how cynical, ultimately starts out with a set of mythological beliefs, sincerely understood to be ultimate truths by the propagandists. Julius Streicher and then Joseph Goebbels of the NAZI Party really believed that Jews were an evil plague upon humanity and then created propaganda to convince others of its truth. The unexamined acceptance of mythology, common wisdom if you will, is perhaps a person’s greatest handicap in trying to understand the world they live in.
Central to American mythology is the idea of the “rugged individualist” as the driving force behind our country’s success. This myth holds that all of American progress came through the exertions of extraordinary men, going their own way, charting their own courses and bringing the rest of the populace along with them as followers of their iconoclastic natures. We have the legends of Daniel Boone, “Johnny Appleseed” and Paul Bunyan to represent how individualists helped spread the White Man in his quest to claim all of our “manifest destiny”. Like most mythology the process of the accretion of heroic stature onto real people came from a need to find “men” the populace could emulate and follow. This need came from the loose alliance of business and political interests seeking to make this country into a world power and seeking to exploit the bounty of its natural resources as they each pursued their selfish interests.
In the Revolutionary War we saw the creation of heroic myths used to rally people to the cause and then glorify the revolution to a population that did not overwhelmingly support it. Once the battle had been won a national mythology was needed to make this collection of localities and populations coherent. Think of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in upper New England. Remember Nathan Hale’s speech on the gallows; Sam Adams radically rousing the people of Boston; Paul Reveres’ Ride; “The Shot Heard Round the World”; and of course the Boston Tea Party. These people and instances, along with the individual mythology surrounding the wisdom of our “Founding Father’s”, were used as a common mythology to take a collection of diverse localities and meld them into a national whole. That there was much truth to the fact of the extraordinary talents of some of these individuals does not diminish their mythological aspect, merely it enhances it.
To briefly bring us forward in time we see the mythology of the “rugged individualist” as the driving force of the American success story throughout our subsequent history. Behind that of course, is the belief in “great men” doing “heroic deeds” as being those who impel history, leading along the rest of us who lack their stature. We see this mythmaking in the “Taming of The West”; in the Civil War; in our “Industrial Revolution”, in fact this theme of individual greatness runs through the entire history of this country and to illustrate it let me just list a bunch of names and allow you to conjure the images these names produce:
Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, George Armstrong Custer, John Jacob Astor, Eli Whitney, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, Teddy Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK, MLK, RFK, Ronald Reagan, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
I’m sure as you read these names all of them are familiar to you, but beyond that familiarity there comes to your mind a back-story that is full of detail. Though all of these were real people, they have already passed into American Mythology because of the mental associations you have with them and the partially mythologized detail of their particular life stories. I specifically chose those names because all of them can be associated with “rugged individualism”, American History, American Progress and the belief that great “Men” impel progress. The “Great Man” theme is certainly not unique to our country; it is in fact a common thread throughout humanity. Where America has taken this theme though, in the minds of many powerful political and economic forces in this country, is into the sense of “rugged individualism” representing the backbone of the “great men” who drive our history and create the mythology of “American Exceptionalism”.
If you accept “rugged individualism”, as exemplified by “Great Men”, as the driving force of progress and growth of our society, then logically it is to the needs of these “great men” that we must all cater. We see the truth of this today in the popularity of the works of Ayn Rand and the pervasive influence of libertarian philosophy. Viewing issues from this perspective leads one to the conclusion that any attempt by the government (or society) to restrain the individual rights of any person, or corporate entity, creates stifling counter-productive effects on our country. If we are all merely individuals ultimately responsible to ourselves, then we must be the sole guardians of our personal interests, without any mediation from the “nanny state”.
In this past election there was a recurring theme of much Republican and Libertarian argument that is the outgrowth of the “rugged individualism” mythology. The counterpoint between the people who “produced” for our economy and the 47% of those who merely took from it was put forth repeatedly. The idea of the entrepreneur as the modern “rugged individualist” hero creating wealth for all of us, was so common as to be a “given” in much political debate. Even the ultimate representative of collectivist bureaucracy, the Corporation, was seen from a “rugged individualist’s” perspective; since they were run by “entrepreneurial hero” CEO’s, who with their strength of leadership and wisdom provided for their workers.
I believe that the idea of the “rugged individual”, seen through the lens of American History, is not only dangerous but utterly false. I assert that it is contrary to the history of humanity from pre-historic ages unremembered. Humans are by nature “social” animals and humanity’s ascension to dominance on this planet is the result of building societies of ever greater complexity. Yes, to be sure, the actions of great individuals have spurred progress and change for better or worse, but all change occurs limned by the social structure where it occurs. We have had “great people”, geniuses perhaps, moving us forward via innovation due to their thinking outside the box. Yet this genius was nurtured in a particular social context that allowed it to grow. Michelangelo was a genius in his time, but his time included Leonardo Da Vinci and was after all “The Renaissance”. Sir Isaac Newton was a singular genius, but then too Gottfried Liebnitz was his contemporary and their time was the beginning of the “Enlightenment”. Thomas Edison was a genius electrical inventor, but his contemporary of no mean skills and accomplishments was Nikola Tesla and their time was the height of the “Industrial Revolution”.
Despite common belief to the contrary, Henry Ford invented neither the automobile, nor the “assembly line”, but he certainly helped to perfect both, again in the context of an ongoing “Industrial/Technological” Revolution. I celebrate the “individual” who has the ability to think counter to the myths they are born with and who strives to introduce new ways of looking at the world. For better, or ill, I’ve tried to act that way in my own life, so I certainly am no justifier of collective thought and action. Yet no matter how much I would like to believe that I am not the product of my heredity, my social milieu and the country of my birth, I must accept that all of those elements and many more shaped me.
The specious philosophy of “rugged individualism” has caused much ill to this country. It has lent itself to the companion myth of “American Exceptionalism”, because the thinking goes that with our “ruggedly individualistic” natures this country has been raised above all others and it is our destiny to enforce our hegemony. This myth has actually allowed us to create a mythology similar to the mythologies created in countries with overwhelming ethnic homogeneity, like Hitler’s Aryan purity premise in Germany, French “cultural superiority” and/or the Serbs vs. the Croats and vice versa.
We humans do have a need for mythology as a means of establishing societal connectivity. At the same time though, when we allow ourselves to become blinded by the myths we live by, we lose the ability to see our world clearly enough to make logical decisions on the issues that we face. To me the scariest thing about politics in the world today is that our discussions and our debates are muddied by mythological premises to such an extent that we can’t hear other points of view, or allow ourselves to consider them. While this has been generally true throughout human history, our species has never had the power before to destroy everything and everyone. Because of that destructive ability it is imperative that we look beyond our myths to see our present world as it really is. We are on the brink of so many disasters like climate change, over-population and water shortage, that we must seek means of dealing with them. Yet due to the inhalation of various counter productive mythologies we merely talk at each other, allowing events to overwhelm us, as we remain in a state of inaction.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
One of the great economic and political fallacies is the notion that, if **anyone** can succeed, it must be true that **everyone** can succeed. But for that to be true in an economic sense, it would have to be true that there is no limit to how much economic activity a population can support. But this is not the case. We can only utilize so many pizza shops, so many nail salons, so many dog walkers, so many real estate agents, and so on. And it is equally fallacious to presume that entrepreneurs can necessarily create a limitless number of products and companies. Indeed, modern Darwinian capitalism seems to be heading in the direction of ever-greater concentration of economic activity in the hands of fewer and fewer.
At SWM’s suggestion we just got back from seeing Silver Linings. I think you would enjoy the flick, MikeS. Life’s too short to sweat the small shit is one of the themes. Good acting and not the cookie cutter Romance Comedy flicks that clutter the movie screens. I give it 4 stars.
BarkinDog: I vote for the electrician with the dog and house.
MikeS, I am obviously unworthy of even communicating w/ you. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. You dismiss studies and books out of hand. How in the f@ck could a person who considers themself open minded dismiss a book they have not even read. I give you a study on corrupt cities and you dismiss it because it isn’t a longitudnal study, “that would be too difficult” to conduct. I give you a book you simply Google and you call it a “self help book”. You’re exposing yourself as a phoney and paper tiger. Enjoy “the herd” and your myopic view of reality. The posse must be in the saloon. Call their cells. You need some help on this one, paisan. I’m waiting for the “logic, straw man, troll, yada yada”, dude to chime in. I’m sure you are also. We disagree, why can’t you just accept that. What is it w/ you alpha dudes that you have to “win” or be “right.” I accept you don’t agree w/ me. Just let it go, you’ll live longer.
BarkinDog: I would vote for the guy with the union job, house and dog.
itchinBayDog here and I ain’t itchinBay about the background or occupational hazards involved. I just dont like the names Adam, Justin or Jared. They are all names of cerial killers and I dont like nobody that dont like Cheerios. I especially dont like that Adam Lanza guy. In pig latin, which I am used to working with, Adam comes out damDa. I would hate for my kid to be married to an aredJa.
Hi, Dredd,
Nice quote on Ayn Rand. You mean she wasn’t perfect, not fallible? She picked poorly, perhaps because she knew less at the time than you do now? She knew when she wrote that he was what he was later?
You know, really there’s a term for what you did. I call it anachronist (you give what he did in 12/27 while prior quoting Rand in ’28, but no month for her and no indication of when Hickman was actually believed to have done what he did). I think historians have a better term, but I can only remember it as by my own filter: “stupid BS”.
Jessie James and John Dillinger were folk heroes. Later, not so much. You do realize for the whole time the FDIC didn’t cover their robberies?
As to the rugged individualist: would you want your son or daughter to marry one? Lets say that Sheila brings home for parental vetting at Xmas time a guy from Princeton. named Adam, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and wants to be a business guy when he graduates from business school. Then at Easter she brings home some guy, John, who works as an electrician who does home repairs for a union shop and brings home a good sum of money every day and every year. This one already has a house and dog. Then on July 4th she comes home with Jared who is a computer science guy who has invested himself in a start up company called AppsRus. Finally, at Tanksgiving she drags home Justin, the son of a Bain Capital guy, who just graduated from beauty school and wants to set up his own shop–with no help from daddy who has cut him off.
On those facts alone, how would you rate the candidates? It turns out that they are all in the picture and all want Sheila to marry them.
Your responses, please.
PreacherDog,
‘America will keep the tradition of having members come up from hard scrabble to obtain not only success in business or accumulation of money but success in academic circles or professions like law chemistry or computer science.”
Ah, to some it’s Horatio Alger but to others Alger Hiss.
BarkinDog.
“The “rugged individualist” is more in sync with the post civil war Radical Reconstructionist agenda which was passed into constitutional law with the Fourtheenth Amendment.” Yeah, the Mountain Men were all during/after Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment. Even though they date to 50+ years earlier. You must mean their right to be Senators, or apportioned Representatives, or the obligation of both to have not been part of an Insurrection, or something about public debt. Maybe they didn’t qualify as born or naturalized. I just can’t find “rugged individualist” in that Amendment, or the 13th or the 15th. Just not there, but give me the line with the quote and I’ll give you your justification.
It took rugged individualists to bind together to form a communal effort to cross the Great American Desert (look at the early to mid 19th Century maps, and understand the meaning), with the knowledge that they would not only face that Desert but also the continual Indian Wars. It wasn’t getting your kicks on Route 66.
I see both individualism and communal effort. Without individualism nothing would have happened, we’d still be huddled on the East Coast, but without communal effort, we’d be in New Jersey talking about those crazy Mountain Men (that would have made a great Jersey Shore episode). It takes both, but one originates. The Mountain Men did it on their own, they were unique.
Ayn Rand? I’ve read “Anthem”, “We the Living”, “The Fountain Head” (the best), and “Atlas Shrugged” (a real slog), and she did praise workers too, not solely the drivers. It’s in there, but her praise was for workers that took their jobs to heart, did the job to their best, and worked for excellence. It’s there, you just have to find it as her thrust was the drivers, the creators. Ayn Rand wasn’t against government, just to the degree that government controlled behavior destructively. I never saw in her books that “government didn’t secure rights” but that government can ignore what are rights to secure what aren’t. In “The Fountainhead” it was about the government recognizing rights of the individual, if only by contract. She was never against government in the books I covered. It’s a common mistake to misunderstand a government that secures individual rights with one that doesn’t.
She did have a strong authoritarian bent, so well expressed in her private life, but that’s not unusual for anti-authoritarians. Her expression of right government in her novels was government limited by individual rights. Communitarian rights by government were not rights but the repudiation of individual rights and ultimately the destruction of those rights…That’s the government she opposed.
Remember, she came from a communist society. She left during the slide from the apex of Marxist-Leninism in ’25 (this beginning the shuffle that the sociopath Stalin would ultimately win). Her name was actually Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum. Maybe the Pogroms affected her outlook too.
““The belief that all individuals, or nearly all individuals, can succeed on their own and that government help for people should be minimal.” That’s a 20th Century concept or definition if only over minimal; the men and women that went into Kentuck, and further, had no concept of your definition, their maximal was military help which wouldn’t even meet your meaning of minimal.
America will keep the tradition of having members come up from hard scrabble to obtain not only success in business or accumulation of money but success in academic circles or professions like law chemistry or computer science.
More on the mythology of the “rugged individual” as envisioned by Ayn Rand:
(Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy – 3). Is it any wonder that the rogue and ruggedly individual government protects mass criminality?
Like Rand, they are evolving from left to right with no end in sight, even though it is just beyond their short sightedness.
The proper role of individualism is to stand up to bullies, selfish pricks, warmongers, hatemongers, and all of that ilk, to instead be decent to others, especially those who are in need through no fault of their own.
Like those victimized by Ayn Rand worshipping Bernie Madoff and the plutocrats who are plundering the law abiding citizenry.
In one sense the “greatest” rugged individual is the rogue government who thinks it does not have to interact with the people, does not have to work for the people, is independent of the people, and is the only sovereign.
The rogue government is what Ayn Rand wanted individuals to be:
(Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy – 4).
Psychopaths.
Ode to Ayn Rand:
Mike S, I love that movie as well “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darlin'” by Tex Ritter so tightly, with sparing score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Cooper’s character, Will Kane, did “do the right thing in life, even if those that were being done for didn’t support the effort…” because he knew it as a duty to himself and the community he served (serving first by putting those men away, and second by keeping the peace the years afterward). He kept imploring that community to help him, as their retribution was first to him but also by what was right or just right for them. The community only came around when they saw his willing sacrifice to be what it was, less for him (he could have left with his Quaker wife) but more for what was right and right for them. A good movie showing many levels of what it means to do what is duty and what is right.
As for Progressive, from T.R. on it encompasses a lot of varied thought. The term has no clear meaning. The Progressives today not T.R.’s Progressives. My take from reading early 20th Century history leaves me with a Marxist or Fascist tinge (I see Technocracy, a hallmark of Progressive, as more Fascist in the late 10s, and 20s, and more Marxist in the 30s in this country, but that may be that I see Wilson as our most Fascist President).
If there’s an underlying meaning to all these terms, it’s that they don’t mean what we think they do unless we know the full history and put them in context. It’s like the guy who says all human progress is liberalism, but when confronted with past liberalism calls it conservatism. And then calls it bad.
Ariel,
The movie demonstrated great values for me at my tender age. So much of what it portrayed for me was to help guide me in the 60 years of my life that followed. You are correct too that the meanings of political labels change through the years. TR believed that only a select few should rule guiding the “unwashed masses”with their wisdom. He also believed in Anglo -Saxon primacy in the world and he was racist. Wilson came from the same “progressive” school of the era and was personally a racist and a bigot. And so it goes. I personally hate all “Ism’s” believing them just a cover for some people’s will to power.
“Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.” Ayn Rand
Bron,
It isn’t that I’m so much against Rand’s formulation, as it is that it presents a dichotomy, which you yourself recognized in a follow up comment:
“isnt a rugged individualist one who just is a strong believer in individual rights? And if you are a strong believer in individual rights then you would also belive in the individual rights of others.”
No, as I used it and provided a definition for it “rugged individualism” is:
“The belief that all individuals, or nearly all individuals, can succeed on their own and that government help for people should be minimal.”
My point is that it is a piece of mythology that bears little relationship to the reality of the human condition. Some who is an “individualist”, however, is a person who tries to follow their own course in the world. I’m an individualist by belief and always have been.
However, you yourself tempered Rand’s individual statement here and I agree with your formulation:
“And if you are a strong believer in individual rights then you would also belive in the individual rights of others.
Individual rights are hard to secure without the force government can bring to bear on those who violate other’s rights.”
Thiese two sentences illustrate the problem with Rand in general, which I think you recognize. Not all strong believers in individual rights would grant those rights to others, or feel that their right to trample over others rights should ever be limited. That is why we need government, to protect us all from those who would trample our individual rights in pursuit of their own aims.
“How could I possibly condescend to someone who plays the Ivy League master degree card. Do you have any clue how elitist and pompous that is?”
Nick,
That is perhaps as pompous and elitist as the quote from you that I responded too:
“We [Nick?] are a distinct minority..~35%. However we comprise 60% of gifted and talented. A high % of parents who home school their child have introverted kids. They don’t fit the cookie cutter, union, educational system. You might know these kids soon, they go to Ivy League schools and will be running this country in short order. So sit tight MikeS, the following decades might be a rough ride for you.”
Is your attention span that short Nick that you don’t even remember the points you make (about yourself presumably) in your own comments? Now go back and please try to understand the point I was making by writing that, which was that I am myself an introvert, but I don’t see that as having made me any better or worse than anyone else.
“My %’s come from the book, The Introvert’s Advantage.”
Marti Olsen Laney Psy.D., who has written the book is a psychotherapist, who is considered an expert on introverts. I would like to know where she got her figures? Her book sounds like just one more popular self-help book designed to cater to a specific population. The link I provided you in my response was to show you that the introvert/extravert distinction is not at all a clear one. However, as usual that got lost on you Nick because you tend not to be able to argue specifics. The fact of the matter though is that nothing in my article even was remotely related to introvert/extravert, but never let it be said that you would let the facts bother you.
BarkinDog, I agree w/ a lot of what you say..very good out of the box comment.
The “rugged individualist” is more in sync with the post civil war Radical Reconstructionist agenda which was passed into constitutional law with the Fourtheenth Amendment. The English kept their lords and lassies and the rest of Europe their kings and their queens. Nobility. There were those in American colonies and thereafter who aspired to be nobles and some were descendents of English or European nobles. This is still true on the East Coast but not prevalent but does somewhat exist out farther west in the places east of the Alleghanies. In Missouri we wouldnt have a Henry Cabot Lodge. We have some think alikes and wannabees. The Danforths come to mind. But our read people in Missouri are guys like Harry Truman and Jesse James. Those two come from differing threads of the rugged indivdualist.
Historians from Harvard and Yale like to keep a tight reign on the history books. Harry Truman is the “failed haberdasher” whereas when they say the words Franklin Delano Roosevelt they sing it with emphasis on the Delano. He was never a failed haberdasher because he was a spoiled rich kid with a silver spoon up his arse til the day he croaked from smoking himself to death. His tests in life were getting an ok grade at Harvard.
The crime family is another aspect of the American myth and view. No one speaks of the fact that Joseph Kennedy was a mobster. The family is ensconsed in Camelot. Other than survive PT 109 what did Jack ever have to do that was rough and tumble or to earn a nickle? The best writer of the crime family as a species of American rugged individualism is the book and movie The Godfather. Don Corleone did not want his kids to be in the mob. Michael had to carry it on but the next generation was programed to have straight careers. But the rugged indivdualist streak in a mobster is a good thing to pass down to the next generations, even if they do end up b eing dull accountants for CitiBank. They can be tough when the tough get going and dont cross the women offspring of a Sicilian mobster. This dog knows, he was a guide dog for a blind mobster.
The East Coast snobbery and affiliation with English lord and lassie culture will not likely fade for another hundred years. When these folks move down to a place like North Carolina to retire, their new neighbors size them up for a while and ultimately come to the conclusion that these are folks who think that their poop dont stink. The East Coasters also want to keep alive the notion that the Rockefellers and the Kennedys are special and noble.
As a dog from Missouri, I reject the notion of lord and lassie and exhalted familes. To me the present generation of Kennedys are schmucks. They are not tried and tested in the tough world. They can play with their forelocks like Bobby but really exude no charisma. In terms of leadership, whether politician or the head of a corporation like Bain Capital, I dont want the son of some schmuck like Bobby Kennedy or the son of George Romney.
I predict that in a hundred years the historians will be favorable to Teddy Roosevelt but scalding to FDR. The Kennedy tribe will get F-. A guy like Lyndon Johnson will be criticised for his Vietnam foray but exalted for his role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He put Thurgood Marshal on the Supreme Court. Clinton will score well, and he rose from the briar patch. Obama will be rated well. Lincoln will remain on a pedestal as well he should. Truman will be number three of all Presidents of the 20th Century behind Teddy and LBJ. Clinton next. All were hard scrabble boys.
MikeS, Why didn’t you just say, “You didn’t build that.” It’s much more succint.
@MikeS:
Yes, very and often 🙂
@Beverelliee:
Thank you.
@Bron:
Good posts, nice applicable Rand quotes.