The First Dissident by William Safire

Author:William Safire [Safire, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79986-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

2. “Close” counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades.

In the 1960s, as the selection of party nominees for President shifted from national conventions to state primaries, a slogan was born: “He cared enough to come.” Whenever a campaigner concentrated his time elsewhere, or tried to appear above the battle, an opponent on the scene would blanket the neglected state with the politics of personal presence.

The comedian Woody Allen raised this point to a philosophical adage with his advice to young playwrights fearful of getting produced: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” (When President George Bush misquoted this as 90 percent, I queried Mr. Allen, who replied: “The figure seems high to me today, but I know it was more than sixty and the extra syllable in seventy ruins the rhythm of the quote, so I think we should let it stand at eighty.”)

We have seen how Job teaches leaders to reach out and renew their strength by testing their sovereign publics. Now we will examine how leaders can succeed by showing up—by caring enough to come. Authorities must let subjects reach out and touch them.

We are talking not about pressing the flesh but pressing the spirit. Thomas Hobbes, the most illustrious English political scientist until John Locke came along, took a name out of Job for the title of his most famous book. Leviathan was published in 1651, just after Oliver Cromwell overthrew the monarchy. You remember Leviathan—not the literal crocodile, or Melville’s Moby Dick, but the mythic fire-breathing dragon. In ancient Ugaritic texts that preceded or paralleled the Hebrew writings, the good god Baal conquered Lotan, the symbol of evil, described as “the serpent Twisty, the Tyrant with seven heads”. In Hebrew Scripture, the sea serpent surfaces again, as the voice of God asks from the whirlwind: “Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fish-hooks?” He asks this question as a way to belittle Man’s power, warning: “If ever you lift your hand against him, think of the struggle that awaits you, and let be.”3

The security-centered Hobbes used the name Leviathan to label a commonwealth, or state, “which is but an artificial man”. He constructed an elaborate metaphor about a monstrous body politic. First Hobbes described humanity in a state of nature, without government, and with the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. (Great name for a law firm.) This Leviathan’s strength is the wealth of its members; its nerves are reward and punishment; its reason is law; its soul is sovereignty; its business is the public safety; its sickness, sedition; its death, civil war. Those were the days a political thinker could really extend a metaphor.

Political Man, according to Hobbes, conceived this Leviathan state for the purpose of self-preservation: By putting their sovereignty into one awesome pot, individual citizens could supposedly guarantee the good behavior of all. The Hobbesian choice was between despotism and anarchy, and Hobbes came down hard in favor of despotism. For the sake of the individual’s

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