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.”

    Page 1

     

    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

  • 03/01/2023: New words from Dictionary.com that I like

    rage farming noun. Informal. the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media, in order to elicit angry responses and thus high engagement or widespread exposure for the original poster. 📝 This term was coined in 2022 (in the form rage farmed) by investigative reporter John Scott-Railton. Read about some other terms for […]
  • 02/27/2023: How to solve the work week.

    From Business Insider: “I do ‘Bare Minimum Mondays’ at work.” The TikTok creator and startup founder Marisa Jo Mayes says it helps her beat the “Sunday scaries” and avoid burnout — and it has completely changed her life. Find out more. If enough TikTok influencers can work really hard to brand not working at all […]
  • 02/25/2023: We Still Smoke the Water Pipe

    I found a quote in one of my notebooks from the second year of the Iraq war (3/20/2005). “Life goes on,” Hayawi says. “We are in the middle of a war, and we still smoke the water pipe.” This feels like a universal message to me. After some work in the shop with the search […]
  • 02/25/2023: A Conversation with Tim Frye on what's changed since the invasion of Ukraine

    I talked to Timothy Frye, the Marshall D. Shulman professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University, for “CBS News Prime Time” about how Russia’s war in Ukraine has changed global energy, the economy and politics.    
  • 01/08/2023: House GOP Learned How to Govern

  • 12/14/2022: Did someone have inside information?

    60 seconds before CPI number came out there was significant trading activity: Bloomberg thinks someone got the news!
  • 12/14/2022: Reality and columnists are two different things.

    “The world is much worse than it would have been had the virus not emerged, and that’s not the fault of columnists you disagree with.” Matt Yglesias.
  • 12/13/2022: Spies Just like us.

    The Ruskies next door. Our story on it on CBS News Prime Time can be found here.
  • 12/13/2022: Sam Bankman Fried not instilling confidence.

    “Like I, like, kind of vaguely knew, kind of, sort of maybe, um, on a qualitative level what was going on.” — Sam Bankman Fried on Unusual Whales podcast on movement of customer funds from FTX to Alameda without permission. via Dealbook
  • 01/01/1970: Meetings can be a black hole that sucks your soul from your body. Priya Parker describes how to make them more intentional.

    I have long been obsessed with intention in even the mundane tasks in life. Priya Parker has put intention into gatherings and meetings. I talked to her about her book and her ideas on Prime Time 3/16/23 as a part of our shifting workplace special. We wanted to talk to her because if the workplace […]