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1Shortly after Barack Obama had been elected the first African American .. family provides the emotional and philosophical basis for Obama's political vision​.
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F or days of the year the sprawling Bauhaus campus of the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado, is rigorously maintained in a state of minimalist serenity. The campus was constructed in the s along the Bauhaus principles that form should follow function and that design can elevate the soul to transform the world. But for ten days every June, when the Aspen Ideas Festival is in full swing, a technicolour fever dream descends and the campus becomes a corporate never-never land.


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Allstate, an insurance company, showed up with a juice kiosk, where smiling staff handed out freshly pressed concoctions of ginger, carrot and kale from the windows of a bright blue bus. Anderson Park, a lightly landscaped meadow with magnificent views of snow-capped mountains, was occupied by plexiglass neon trees and brightly coloured human-sized plastic balls. For it was ideas that were on offer, and ideas were what everyone said they had come to hear. As we walked we kept stopping to say hello to Aspen supporters, devotees and collaborators whom we met along the way.

Bill Browder, a financier and nemesis of the Kremlin, checked out the lunch offering in blue jeans and a baseball cap. Jackie Bezos, mother to Jeff, stood in line for the buffet. It felt like being trapped on the front page of the New York Times. Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of The Economist , also attended the festival and spoke on a number of panels. Porterfield, a former English professor, civil servant and university president, greeted participants with an amiable handshake and a smile. A little more than a year since taking over, he already seemed quite at home at the Aspen Institute.

Porterfield is unfussy and effusive. He wore frameless glasses, a blue blazer and has closely trimmed grey stubble. For the past 70 years the institute has helped to define and shape the spectrum of acceptable views in American politics.

History as Obama elected America's first black president

For most of the year the institute offers a plethora of policy and leadership-development seminars and summits. The Ideas Festival is the equivalent of its homecoming weekend, ten breathless days at high altitude Aspen sits at just over 2, metres when a swathe of Washington power-players, Republican and Democrat alike — politicians, journalists, Nobel prizewinners, self-help gurus, diplomats, poets, bureaucrats, artists and spies — make the pilgrimage to the mountain seeking enlightenment and intellectual recuperation.

The tiny airport is filled with private jets and black Suburbans. Bush walking the grounds just after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in ; Condoleezza Rice, before she became secretary of state, leaning over a seminar table. Association with Aspen can endow you with the crispness, vitality and lucidity of the mountain air. Politicians in France, Spain, Italy and many other countries have gone through similar programming.

A New Zealand branch has just opened; plans are in the works for outposts in Britain, Colombia, the Balkans and a yet-to-be-decided location in Africa. But over the past few years, in the Philippines and Hungary, Turkey and India, and in America itself, a new kind of leader has emerged, one whose characteristics are far from the Aspen ideal: bombastic rather than judicious, partisan rather than consensual, an inciter of passions rather than a follower of evidence.

A world facing formidable challenges, including climate change, trade wars and rising nationalism, needs leaders willing to confront such threats — and Aspen reckons it can continue to supply them. There are others, however, who believe that Aspen embodies the establishment complacency that created the conditions in which populism fomented. At the Ideas Festival, my handlers created an internal schedule for me, shuttling me from the head of one initiative to the head of another.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The institute was building high schools, educating the underprivileged, creating cultural dialogue across continents. Did I have any questions? T he idea for the Aspen Institute first emerged after the second world war. In Walter Paepcke, a Chicago businessman, planned a bicentennial celebration of the life of Goethe. Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, chose Aspen because it was both beautiful and easily accessible from either coast.

The Paepckes saw Goethe as a prime advocate of the underlying unity of mankind. He also worried about the corrosive effects of rapidly proliferating wealth.

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Herbert Hoover, the former president, was named honorary chairman; Thomas Mann joined the board of directors. Nor were they interested in emulating business schools. They wanted to shape leaders, not merely improve managers. Through encounters with the classics, executives would learn to restrain the worst excesses of capitalism and politicians would be able to draw on the wisdom of the ages as they reached their decisions.

The Aspen Institute gradually cemented its place in American political life. The institute made a name for itself as a place where American values were defended, and where the virtues of democratic deliberation, meritocracy and leadership with moral purpose were championed. It promoted a set of attitudes that transcended party affiliations and defined the acceptable parameters of American politics: anti-communism, Atlanticism, faith in the rules-based international order and the power of capitalism to benefit all.

EIGHT YEARS IN AMERICA

Acolytes tend to describe the Aspen Institute and its workings in mystical terms. Activities fall into three categories: leadership, policy and public events such as the Ideas Festival. Its leadership programmes include a variety of fellowships for executives and disrupters of all kinds, in politics, business, health and education. The experience is meant to imitate a university seminar. Confucius, Amartya Sen and Rousseau are also part of the curriculum. Aung San Suu Kyi has now been excised. His successor, Donald Trump, is less given to introspection. That change in approach has consequences for the entire nation.


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  7. How has the Aspen Institute responded? With more discussion though it did make an effort to attract Trump supporters to the Ideas Festival to explore the future of conservatism. As the masses gather against the elite, the elite digs in. F or a week in early June, the Aspen Institute allowed me to experience the Aspen method as a full participant in an executive seminar.

    All members must participate. The play tells the story of Creon, an uncompromising ruler, who forbids Antigone from burying her rebellious dead brother. But in Aspen it is performed many times each year. For the inaugural performance in or , no one is quite sure , businessmen donned togas and recited the play. Since then everyone from CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer to Queen Noor of Jordan to Netflix boss Reed Hastings has performed the play, as well as a revolving door of intelligence directors, colonels and consultants.

    Participants are encouraged to reimagine the play, including altering the ending. When she participated in the seminar, the Dalai Lama happened to be visiting Aspen, so her seminar group took a lighthearted approach and altered the play in his honour. In , after leaving the State Department, she founded the Aspen Ministers Forum, which brings together senior diplomats and foreign ministers from around the world to discuss global challenges.

    In the group wrote to Congress urging it to keep supporting the Iran nuclear deal. A few weeks before my seminar began, I received a customised anthology, along with instructions to read each text twice before arriving. I was presented with a schedule for the week and the names and biographies of my fellow leaders: the pillars of industry and culture were well represented. Among my colleagues were a Colombian oncologist, an air-force officer, a university president, a British investment manager, a cannabis executive, a social-media executive and a charter-school foundation president from New York.

    I was allowed to participate in the seminar as long as the identities of my fellow participants, who were not told in advance that I would be there, remained anonymous. We were led by two able moderators: Ami Dror, a former Israeli secret-service agent turned educational entrepreneur, and Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar and professor of English.

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    We got to know each other over an opening dinner of sea bass, strawberry flan and bottomless drinks. Some of my fellow-travellers told me that they went into the experience thinking that this would be a fun way to expand their networks and to learn how to sound and act like a leader. For many of us, it turned out to be far more revelatory.

    Thompson gave us our directions: the pamphlet concerned the question of who had a stake in society. Could we apply these same arguments to 21st-century America? We were split into two groups, assigned a side, and told to prepare talking points to debate. I followed the property defenders into an adjoining room where we developed our arguments against expanding the electorate. There was silence.

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    We were unsettled by how commanding she was. Thompson brought the group to order. O ver the next week, we raced through our anthology, frantically asking questions. Why was there so much inequality? Why were racism and sexism so persistent? What was happening to our world?

    We looked to these texts for solutions. Yet though we were urged to relate these books to our lives and the world, the Aspen bubble meant that reality receded into the distance. Over the course of our deliberations, everyone tried to steer the conversation towards their preferred outcome, which made me wonder if being a good leader is fundamentally a matter of strategically mobilising the syntax of politeness.

    Trump and Political Philosophy | SpringerLink

    Finally, the education consultant from Memphis suggested that we stage the play as a trial, with Antigone on one side and Creon on the other. Everyone liked this approach: instead of reading from the script we would distil it to its essence and turn the play into an arbitration between law and conscience a full courtroom procedure was deemed too complicated.

    Pages Front Matter Pages Roman Parallels: Plutarch and the Trump Election. Thomism and Trumpism.