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The Anti-Intellectual Presidency - The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (Hardcover)
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The Anti-Intellectual Presidency - The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (Hardcover)
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How is it that contemporary presidents talk so much and yet say so
little, as H. L. Mencken once descibed, like dogs barking
idiotically through endless nights? In The Anti-Intellectual
Presidency, Elvin Lim tackles this puzzle and argues forcefully
that it is because we have been too preoccupied in our search for a
Great Communicator, and have failed to take presidents to task for
what they communicate to us. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, he
argues, spoke in a qualitatively different style than Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan and Clinton merely connected with us;
the two Roosevelts educated us. To alert us to the gradual rot of
presidential rhetoric, Lim examines two centuries of presidential
speeches to demonstrate the relentless and ever-increasing
simplificaton of presidential rhetoric. If these trends persist,
Lim projects that the State of the Union addresses in the next
century could actually read at the fifth-grade level. Lim argues
that the ever-increasing tendency for presidents to crowd out
argument in presidential rhetoric with applause-rendering
platitudes and partisan punch-lines was concertedly implemented by
the modern White House. Through a series of interviews with former
presidential speechwriters, he shows that the anti-intellectual
stance was a deliberate choice rather than a reflection of
presidents' intellectual limitations. Only the smart, he suggests,
know how to dumb down. Because anti-intellectual rhetoric impedes,
rather than facilitates communication and deliberation, Lim warns
that we must do something to recondition a political culture so
easily seduced by smooth-operating anti-intellectual presidents.
Sharplywritten and incisively argued, The Anti-Intellectual
Presidency sheds new light on the murky depths of presidential
utterances and its consequences for American democracy.
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