Thinking about the state dinner in the UK some months back. No one said anything, of course, but it was clear that the US President was completely out of countenance, and incapable of rising to the occasion. These sorts of moments are very old tests for fitness for power. The gossip at the English court of Elizabeth I was afraid that she would take as a public consort the sort of minor cavaliers with whom she was dallying, and that person would disgrace the throne by being put out of countenance at the other European courts.
The irony, of course, is that the fellow built an empire on a cult-like personal herrschaft. From personal knowledge, there was a real cult of personality in his real estate office. So he was using these same sorts of inchoate, interpersonal dynamics, but not in any ennobling sense. It wasn't a case of a scientific ruler simply being put out of countenance because he was so suffused with the scent of the lamp. Instead, it was a mogul from New Amsterdam who had made his fortune by using personal domination of others and aggressive lawyering, but he had never thought to use the power in the service of noble ends.
Perhaps this is a civilizational fault. I keep thinking back to the festschrift for Dewey's 80th, and the simple one or two page contribution from Whitehead, who simply said that whatever Dewey had done, it had created the necessary mind for America.
I'm still resolutely nonpolitical. Like Washington, I'm above party, but capable of judging parties. And I'm currently in the closest correlative to the political gulag that a prosperous market economy has, so my words really aren't worth all that much.
All the more reason for them to be true.