A Preface to Politics

An observation from "The North American Review," Volume 199 (1914):

Referendum or against it. But the word is full of that narcotic reminiscence, from the constant humming of the pros and cons.

Now comes Mr. Walter Lippmann’s Preface to Politics, concerned with the same themes, traversing the same ground, as many others, and yet with the breath of life in it. Therein lies its value; not in any specific rules of guidance. He says he has attempted to “ sketch an attitude toward statecraft.

"I have tried," he say "to suggest an approach, to illustrate it concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title 'A Preface to Politics,' I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was it written to further a concrete programme. There are, I hope, no assumptions put forward as dogmas."

His illustrations are very concrete indeed, and taken from the news of the day before yesterday, and they are manifestly tinged with his own prepossessions and prejudices. The good and bad personages in public life are distinguished very swiftly and despatched in a telling phrase or two. He hates all “routineers,” for example. By routineers, he means the people who follow precedent and never create one, who go on winding the red tape that they find, who think that the “heaven above them is nothing but the roof.” Senator Lodge is a sad example of the routineer. No new perception of popular need will ever dawn on Senator Lodge, he says, and his “manners have that immobility which comes from too much gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen.” He hates also the typical university professor and takes as an “extreme example.” Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, who in the space of six months wrote an impassioned defense of “constitutional government,” beginning with the question, “Why is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have associations that are chiefly of evil omen?” and then to make irony complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?

Taft also was an utter routineer, who even denied himself the leadership of which he was capable lest it might interfere with the automatic running and the “balance” of the Government. Roosevelt, on the other hand, is a type of the genuine political inventor.

The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, Lloyd George, is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.... Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute. The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current until it overflowed the countryside.... When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real task of a leader - a task which has essentially two dimensions. By becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of effectiveness: by formulating a programme for insurgency be translated it into terms of public service.