{"id":1457583,"date":"2022-04-29T08:01:15","date_gmt":"2022-04-29T12:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1457583"},"modified":"2022-04-29T08:01:21","modified_gmt":"2022-04-29T12:01:21","slug":"why-recovering-the-lost-art-of-statesmanship-requires-curbing-a-rabid-corporate-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/why-recovering-the-lost-art-of-statesmanship-requires-curbing-a-rabid-corporate-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Recovering The Lost Art Of Statesmanship Requires Curbing A Rabid Corporate Media"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwhy-recovering-the-lost-art-of-statesmanship-requires-curbing-a-rabid-corporate-media%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1457583&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/statesman.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>\u201cInhabiting These States today, George would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit,\u201d wrote American satirist H.L Mencken of our most respected Founding Father, George Washington. \u201cThe Senate would never dare confirm him; the President would not think of nominating him; He would be on trial in the newspapers for belonging to the Money Power\u2026. He would be under indictment by every grand jury south of the Potomac.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Rather than being \u201cfirst in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,\u201d as Light Horse Harry Lee called him, Washington would be ripped to shreds by enterprising attorneys and a fickle media.<\/p>\n<p>Mencken wrote that reflection on America\u2019s preeminent statesman a little more than 100 years ago, but his point is even more relevant today. There are entire Beltway organizations devoted to both trying to dig up dirt on politicians (and even prospective ones), or helping those considering public office to evaluate what dirt already exists on them so they can do damage control. <\/p>\n<p>Media (and social media) have turned politics into an entertainment industry of endless packable soundbites aimed at defaming the other side. In contrast, 150 years ago, Americans <a href=\"https:\/\/www.senate.gov\/artandhistory\/history\/common\/generic\/Classic_Speeches.htm\">sat for <em>hours<\/em><\/a> listening to speeches and debates by those seeking even local office.<\/p>\n<p>This is not the way to foster authentic statesmen. Real statesmen, said nineteenth-century American Catholic writer Orestes Brownson, require \u201cpublic spirit, intelligence, foresign, broad views, manly feelings, wisdom, energy, and resolution.\u201d Now we pay more attention to likeability, ability to deliver zingers, or the capacity to check certain boxes demanded by our identity politics regime. Our two major parties obsess over polling to determine what candidates will be best suited to satisfy the amorphous desires of our distractible, capricious citizenry.<\/p>\n<h2>Prudentialism vs. Partisanship<\/h2>\n<p>Statesmanship is the topic of a new book by Assumption University professor emeritus Daniel J. Mahoney entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.encounterbooks.com\/books\/the-statesman-as-thinker\/\"><em>The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation<\/em><\/a>. \u201cWhat is needed today,\u201d says Mahoney, \u201cis not a return to classical politics per se but an openness to the judicious mix of realism and moral aspiration that informed the classical political philosophies of Aristotle and Cicero in particular.\u201d He offers reflections from not only classical thinkers, but Edmumd Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, and V\u00e1clav Havel to help us perceive what this looks like not only in theory but practice.<\/p>\n<p>Mahoney identifies a number of important qualities common among the great statesmen. \u201cThe thoughtful or reflective statesman exercises what the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent calls \u2018commanding practical reason,\u2019 not arbitrary power or a plan to satisfy the lowest impulses of his soul,\u201d he writes. Rather, this prudentialism serves the common good.<\/p>\n<p>True statesmen also reject narrow partisanship, which Mahoney argues \u201csunders the unity of the political community and, in extremis, can lead to civil war and self-seeking at the expense of the common good.\u201d Such a political leader, embodied in the writings of Cicero, prefers \u201cpeace to war, magnanimity to peevish resentment, clemency to the perpetual aggravation of the hatreds and divisions that destroy the moral integrity of the civic community.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The best politician employs the intellectual and moral virtues and \u201call the powers of the soul,\u201d with proper humility and deference to divine and moral law, to better the community. When such a leader achieves this, even briefly, citizens recognize that he or she has approached the peak of human excellence.<\/p>\n<p>Yet is there anyone in recent memory who fits such a description? What national leaders might we point to in the United States and say, \u201cYes, that is a politician who is a worthy successor to Washington, James Madison, or Lincoln\u201d? Is there anyone to fit the model of a \u201cbeaux ideal of a statesman,\u201d that famous Lincolnian description of Kentucky politician Henry Clay? Have men (or politics) changed so much that such statesmanship is no longer even possible?<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps, although I\u2019d argue that it is the fourth estate, the modern media that is supposed to help <em>preserve <\/em>the integrity of American politics, that actually obscures and undermines statesmanship in the American republic. Part of the problem is what Neil Postman diagnosed almost 40 years ago in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepublicdiscourse.com\/2020\/10\/72174\/\"><em>Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em><\/a>: a media less focused on informing than it is on entertaining. There\u2019s also the headache caused by a 24\/7 news cycle \u2014 driven by television and social media \u2014 that has made it impossible to ever escape the endless supply of political controversies, no matter how unimportant or fabricated.<\/p>\n<p>We must also mention the fact that corporate media has <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/12\/07\/we-need-a-more-forceful-pushback-to-a-hostile-media\/\">entirely abandoned any attempt at objectivity<\/a>. Although still trying to present themselves as unbiased, corporate media \u2014 from the Washington Post and New York Times to CNN and MSNBC \u2014 are unabashedly partisan in their news reporting, let alone on op-ed pages and talk shows. Yes, Fox News leans right \u2014 but none of the other major networks do, nor any of the prominent national newspapers. This means that conservative politicians can expect nothing but opprobrium and personal attacks from journalists who claim to be interested in \u201cjust the facts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Consider how the Washington Post, which is a local newspaper for many Virginians, has covered Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin since he was elected in November 2021. It wasn\u2019t just that the Post was outspokenly critical of Youngkin when he ran for office, but that they have sought to conflate anything that has happened in his first year in office as a reflection of his poor leadership, if not his supposed bigotry.<\/p>\n<p>When Youngkin refused to wear a mask at a grocery store in Alexandria, the Post <a href=\"https:\/\/spectatorworld.com\/topic\/resist-age-grievance-glenn-youngkin\/\">featured critical articles (and op-eds)<\/a> about it, even though the city of Alexandria had no mask mandate, and the state mask mandate in schools was dropped shortly thereafter \u2014 with support from Virginia Democrats. When a Richmond high-school student picked a fight with whoever runs the governor\u2019s Twitter account, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/dc-md-va\/2022\/02\/06\/youngkin-twitter-attack-student\/\">his campaign responded in kind<\/a>, the Post made Youngkin out to be an ogre needlessly attacking defenseless kids. These are faux controversies at their best, and leftist corporate media eats up every single last one of them.<\/p>\n<h2>A Desperate Need<\/h2>\n<p>Mahoney understands this toxic reality. He describes a \u201cnew Manichean racialism\u201d that is rigorously enforced in our schools, media, corporations, churches and, indeed, through nearly every institution of civil society,\u201d something Youngkin and other politicians have vigorously pushed back against, and taken heat as either a racist or a dog-whistler for racists. <\/p>\n<p>Mahoney criticizes \u201cthe intellectual clerisy in the West,\u201d including academics, activists, and journalists, who are \u201cincreasingly committed to the negation or repudiation of our civilizational inheritance.\u201d They represent a coercive regime \u201cfounded on the manipulation of language and the forced imposition of ideological cliches with little or no connection to anything real or enduring.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s the problem. The very civil society institutions that are supposed to give republican government a persistent vigor and stability are corrupted to the core, obsessed with racial, sexual, and gender identitarianism that fosters a self-destructive tribalism and \u201ca barely concealed nihilism.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Unless politicians are willing to fight back, the<a href=\"https:\/\/spectatorworld.com\/topic\/when-victimhood-game-everyone-loses\/\"> noose of identitarianism<\/a> will only tighten, especially given that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/woke-capitalism-guns-for-the-south\/\">Woke Capitalism<\/a> and Big Tech are in on the game. As Mahoney observes, we now live in what British intellectual Roger Scruton called a \u201cculture of repudiation\u201d that is at war with human nature and civilization itself.<\/p>\n<p>Mahoney urges Americans to \u201crepudiate repudiation\u201d and \u201copen ourselves to human excellence in all its forms.\u201d I\u2019m certainly game \u2014 how else will we preserve our precarious polis? Given the odds stacked against us, it\u2019s little surprise we are still in desperate need of authentic statesmen.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor\u2019s in history and master\u2019s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master\u2019s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cInhabiting These States today, George would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit,\u201d wrote American satirist H.L Mencken of our most respected Founding Father, George Washington. \u201cThe Senate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":658,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1457583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/658"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1457583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1457583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1457583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1457583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}