John Dickerson

John Dickerson is co-anchor of "CBS Evening News" and anchor of "CBS Evening News Plus." He is also a Contributing Writer to The Atlantic and is co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest.

  • 03/22/2023: Historical Shade and political anti-intellectualism

    Governor Ron DeSantis gave this response to Donald Trump’s nickname “Ron Sanctimonious” in a recent interview: “I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine.”

    The nickname thing is ridiculous, of course, and we should all pay attention to the more substantive and interesting issues related to the debate over national interest going on in the GOP, but DeSantis (who attended Yale and Harvard)(*) running to Trump’s left as an anti-intellectual tells you something about how he views the GOP audience and has a deep tradition in American politics.

    Which brings me to the point of this post.

    Richard Hofstadter could say it well. In this book he refers to presidents Hayes and Benjamin Harrison as “innocent of distinction.”

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    Here’s the thing though about the point DeSantis is making: It’s an intellectual one. He’s said in the interview, don’t pay attention the name calling, pay attention to the kind of team a leader builds and their capacity for execution. Pay attention to what the job requires, not the way a leader makes you feel with his barbs. As a person who wrote a book arguing a version of this about the presidential selection process I recognize the pitch!

    As I think about DeSantis’ remark, I can’t really produce in the noggin a modern conservative elitist boogeyman of the kind of role that Willilam F. Buckley played. Kevin Phillips, author and former Nixon aide, called Buckley “Squire Willie,” and in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, (1969) heralded a “New Right” that connected with real people. “Nor can we expect Alabama truck drivers or Ohio steelworkers to sign on with a politics captivated by Ivy League five-syllable word polishers,” wrote Phillips, who attended Harvard. “Any politics or coalition has to surge up from Middle America … not dribble down from Bill Buckley’s wine rack and favorite philosophers shelf.”

    *Is it likely that the Governor of Florida doesn’t understand this word? It is unlikely. Pretending you don’t know a word when you know a word is the kind of thing that Donald Trump might spend a lot of time lampooning. All the while he does so, Trump will repeat the word “sanctimonious,” thereby cementing the underlying charge. Then, people will go look up the word and see that it means “making a show of being morally superior to other people,” and they will decide that pretending you don’t know a word and that a childish nickname doesn’t matter to you because you’re focused on morally superior pursuits is a behavior consistent with a word you recently looked up.

  • More Notions

  • 04/14/2023: Summer's End

    It’s hot today for the first time of the season, which makes it feel like the start of summer. Time to start stacking the sandbags against the end of summer blues. The sun is going down. This song came on shuffle. It’s from John Prine’s Tree of Forgiveness. Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of the […]
  • 04/08/2023: Chat GPT and checking yourself

    When your words don’t land as you intend it can be because a) you were unclear b) the people listening misunderstood your point or c) some members of the audience are willfully misunderstanding what you say. I was recently asked about the Tennessee lawmakers kicked out of the body. So I asked Chat GPT to […]
  • 04/02/2023: CBS This Morning on Trump Indictment

  • 04/01/2023: What's in the Indictment? A debate with Chat GPT

    Here is an argument about the recent indictment of former President Trump: Former President Donald Trump has been indicted. The people who know what is in the indictment aren’t talking. The people who are talking don’t know what’s in the indictment. None of them do. It’s sealed. Nevertheless, a lot of time will be spent […]
  • 04/01/2023: Chat GPT is terrible at poltiics

    Question: The Manhattan district attorney has issued an indictment of Donald Trump but the facts are not known and will not be known for several days, how should that encourage or discourage a person from forming opinions about the indictment itself? As an AI language model, I cannot provide personal opinions, but I can offer […]
  • 03/28/2023: See the gift, ease the burden.

    Everyone has at least one gift and one burden. It is hard to find the gift in some people. See the gift, ease the burden.

  • 03/26/2023: Old note found: moving up the time of grace

    Dr. Nadia Chaudhri died on October 5, 2021. She narrated her death from cancer on her Twitter feed. Every time I read her writing I thought about the grace on display. The lessons she was able to give us. I just found a note I wrote to myself after reading one of her entries: “move […]
  • 03/25/2023: A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion

    The Met has a wonderful write-up of all that is going on in this etching: James Gillray’s famously brutal caricature of George, Prince of Wales encapsulates the effects of uncontrolled self-indulgence upon the heir to the British throne. Sprawled in his chair after a lavish meal, the prince picks his teeth with a meat fork; […]