Rick Perry, American Caudillo
28th March 2015
I guess it’s the Atlantic‘s turn to start the inevitable round of ‘journalistic’ hit-jobs on any Republican candidate to the right of Hillary Clinton. The subhed tells the tale:
The former Texas governor turned a constitutionally weak office into a source of tremendous informal power.
He can’t get around the fact that the office is ‘constitutionally weak’, so Perry can’t be a real ‘caudillo’ (he’d have used ‘fuehrer’ if he’d thought he could get away with it, but he dimly perceived that everybody would just laugh at that one), but Perry has to be somehow painted as a ‘caudillo’, so he’s going after Perry’s ‘informal’ power. (How dare you have informal power, you fascist!)
Being a Voice of the Crust means that sometimes you can just phone it in. (I want Richard Parker’s job. I want a job where you don’t have to think in order to be paid for writing.)