Sam Tanenhaus has written a piece for the September issue of Prospect (out on Thursday) about Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), whom he describes as having been “for half a century the most vibrant, at times it seemed the only, genuine intellectual in American politics.” The piece is, among other things, an anatomy of the “curious mix of passivity and agitation” that characterises politics in the US—Moynihan, Tanenhaus says, “towers before us [as] a vanished, much-missed type,” a visionary of a distinctively American kind. Today, neither of America’s “two damaged parties,” he argues, is capable of “marshalling a sustained idea, in its programmes and policies and in its arguments or rhetoric, of what might constitute a better or more just society…”

As for the press corps that covers those parties, they’re guilty, in Tanenhaus’s view, of gussying up reporting as melodrama. He quotes the historian Richard Hofstadter’s description of politics in the media age as “an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected.” The only difference between today and 1954, when Hofstadter was writing, is that now “the principal dynamic is no longer the familiar one of leader and led. It is the voyeuristic bond that unites ‘content provider’ and ‘user’.”

Tanenhaus doesn’t say in this piece who he thinks the journalistic equivalent of Moynihan might have been, the “much-missed type” whose example throws a decidedly unflattering light on the work of the reporters toiling away on Capitol Hill today. But as it happens,  I had an exchange with him on Twitter a couple of months ago (after he’d writte…

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