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- [02:13]
Richard Holtzman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:17]
Nick Cheeseman
Hello and welcome to New Books in Interpretive, Political and Social Science on the New Books Network. I'm Nick Cheeseman, host of the series and this episode. It's my pleasure to be in conversation with Richard Holtzman to discuss his 2025 contribution to the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. Rich is an Associate professor of Political Science at Bryant University in Rhode island, and his book is titled what does the American Presidency? The need for Interpretation in Presidency Stud. This is a thought provoking title on a timely topic, whether everyone speaking as we are in March 2026 in the thick of Trump 2 and rich, whereas on every other episode it would have been a diversion from the topic to get into a conversation about the Trump presidency, I have a great opportunity with you to dive straight in and ask if you have any hot takes on the current situation. Just to set up discussion up.
- [03:19]
Richard Holtzman
Thank you, Nick, for having me. It's an honor to be here. Hot Takes on the Current situation I have the same question that I have typically had when it comes to the presidency in American politics, and one that I often share with my students, which is what the hell is going on? And I always let my students know that the answer is much more interesting than we might think, because the answer is up for debate. And in the case currently, when we look at President Trump and this war in Iran, even over the course of this day on which we're speaking, things have changed from hour to hour in terms of the president, maybe an hour ago before we're recording this, saying, well, the war is pretty much over. And then half an hour later he walked that back. And so in terms of my understanding of the presidency or the way that I look at it, I try to make sense of what the President does and says by placing it into a broader context. And that involves not necessarily looking to explain in a causal sense why he's doing what he's doing, nor try to explain in a causal sense what the possible outcomes of what he's doing are, but instead to ask this question, which is the title of my book, which is what does it mean that a president says one thing in the morning, something else in the afternoon, and then a half an hour later says something else? And one, at least provisional answer to that question of what that means is that signals problems. That signals that we're in a situation in which the leader of the United States and obviously influential figure on, if not in, but upon the rest of the world, that he's sort of making it up as he goes. And I think one meaning we can draw from that is that's a problem
- [05:15]
Nick Cheeseman
for all of us. Why do you push back against, if I hear you doing that, causal approaches to inquiry into the American presidency? I mean, as political and social scientists, don't we want to do causal inferential work. Isn't that exactly the kind of work that's recommended to us?
- [05:36]
Richard Holtzman
This is a nice question that I think leads to the main focus of the book, or one of the areas of focus, I should say, which is that primarily in political science as studied in the United States, and specifically in the study of the presidency, which I'll call presidency studies, there is a dominant focus on causality. So the idea is let's try to explain things using a causal approach and certain sorts of methodologies and methods. And therefore, if we can identify causality, then we can draw out generalizable conclusions. Right. So when it comes to studying the presidency, the idea would be, well, we want to understand the presidency as an institution, and therefore not necessarily a particular president or a particular president during a particular point in time within a particular context. But instead we want to be able to generalize, to come up with something akin to explanatory laws of political behavior. So the book is not necessarily pushing back on that as much as making an argument that says there are other ways to make sense of politics in the presidency as well. And one of those alternative ways is interpretivism, to ask questions not about causality, but to ask questions about meaning. And so I'm very careful in the book. It's not a polemic against causal oriented research. Instead, it's an argument for pluralism. It's an argument that says there are in fact, multiple different ways that we can try to make sense of the presidency. And in fact, in particular, when we're looking at the presidency, I argue that interpretivism reveals a lot of things that are not seen, or by a more positivist causal approach that may have certain blind spots to issues concerning meaning.
- [07:41]
Nick Cheeseman
Could you give an example?
- [07:42]
Richard Holtzman
I mean, let's. Let's take the current example of this war in Iran. Interestingly, the most dominant way that those who study the presidency, for the most part, and I don't want to pass too wide of a net, but I'll just say that the mainstream in presidency studies, when it concerns things like presidential rhetoric or the language that presidents use, this approach asks causal questions about that rhetoric. So again, the idea is, well, what is the president trying to accomplish by using this rhetoric or choosing this sort of language? And we can measure the causal impact or the influence of that language through public opinion polls. So if a president says something about why we need to go to war in Iran, then we could later test and see how influential or impactful that language was. In this case, the current president never really made an argument about why the United States needs to go in Iran. There were 6, 7, 8 different possible reasons mentioned. None of them were fully developed. None of them were supported by evidence. And as a result, from an interpretive perspective, my argument would be, well, if we're attached to methods that are focused on measuring causal influence, then we're going to miss perhaps larger points about this President's language. And from my standpoint as an interpretivist, I see the President's language more in the form of a spectacle. What I mean by that is it's not so much trying to accomplish certain goals as much as to be a demonstration of power, for instance, or to be symbolic. And if it's a spectacle, then that makes us spectators. Right? So the idea is that the President is going to put on a show. And our job is not as citizens to participate or to reflect on or consider whether or not we agree with or buy into a President's arguments about whether we should go to war, but instead to be a spectator to consume that spectacle. In a causal approach in political science that looks at presidential rhetoric as asking the question of what did it accomplish? Ultimately, we'd probably ignore this case because, well, he really wasn't offering that sort of rhetoric. So there's nothing really for us to work with here. Our tools don't apply, and so largely we'll avoid the case. And so that's my worry is that there are significant things that the presidency does in the symbolic and meaning making realm that are beyond the purview of most who study the presidency.
- [10:38]
Nick Cheeseman
So this is, it's a way of saying that, and you say this in the book in different words, that by asking questions that concentrate on causal inference and adopting certain methods, there's a narrowing both of the approach towards the presidency, but also a narrowing of conception of what the presidency, what the institution of the presidency, if you like, is. So another way of putting that being to say that if the questions we ask affect our interpretations of our object of inquiry, your manner of asking the question introduces different objective inquiry from those of your positivist counterparts. Would you agree with that way of reading your text? And is there something more to say there about the relationship between the questions we ask and the presidency that we see?
- [11:36]
Richard Holtzman
I would wholly agree. And I think that can be framed in a few different ways. One is, I use this saying, you know, if all you have is a hammer, then then everything you see are nails. Yes, there are parts of the presidency that are nails and can be addressed with the tool of the hammer. There is much more than nails to the presidency. There are all sorts of other elements that we tend not to see, as you said, Nick, we tend not to ask about, at least in terms of are academic research questions, because they aren't aspects of the presidency or dimensions of the presidency that lend themselves to those research questions. However, I'm guided by many of the questions that my students ask me and also just friends and family ask me or people I come across, and they say, what do you do? And I say, teach and research the presidency. And they have different understandings of the presidency. They see it in all sorts of different ways. And many of those ways are not part of the discussion when it comes to our academic treatment of the presidency and the way we formulate research questions. And in the book, I talk about, well, if you're a lawyer, when you look at the presidency, you ask questions about the law, right? And you ask, well, is what the president doing legal or not? And if you're a politician, you may ask questions about, well, how can the president benefit me? Or how might he hurt me? And if you're a citizen, you may be, especially right now, asking questions about what role does the president have in influencing the price of gasoline? Or how does this president, or any president, make me feel? Am I feeling angry? Am I feeling nervous? Am I feeling thrilled? And what sort of emotions does the president bring out in their actions? And none of those things are typically considered in the study of the presidency. Yet at the same time, all of those are different dimensions of this thing we call the presidency.
- [13:49]
Nick Cheeseman
I'm dying to ask you how you came to ask questions about what the American presidency means. If the dominant approach is positivistic, what then was the route by which you came to this other approach, the interpretivist approach? Did you come in gradually or did you have an epiphany or what.
- [14:10]
Richard Holtzman
I came in struggling. And this came from my experience as a graduate student and recognizing what I found interesting about the presidency and then having difficulty finding it anywhere in the literature. So I think some of that was the result of starting graduate school, considering myself a political philosopher, studying things like the Frankfurt School and Critical theory, and then realizing, while I was intrigued by it, I didn't fully understand it, and I would never get a job studying those sorts of things. But I was always fascinated by American politics, and I think I brought some of the questions that had come to mind in my study of critical theory and the history of political theory and political philosophy. That was sort of my lens in looking at the presidency and realizing that I wanted to Understand, for instance, the symbolism of the president. What are these myths in the United States that we. These legends that we tell about the president, and we see their images everywhere, and they wasn't a historian, so I wasn't interested necessarily in sort of exploding those myths and legends about the president, but instead I was interested in the idea of what sort of power do those have over us? The fact that we see these images around and we tell these stories about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And I was in graduate school during September 11th, and immediately after September 11th, I felt like I really want to be talking about what George W. Bush is doing. And all the questions I was asking, for instance, about what does he mean when he gave that speech at Ground Zero. I wasn't interested in looking at public opinion in response to it. I was interested in the words. I was interested in what he said. I was interested in how the feeling that it gave people. And then I struggled to find much work, much, I should say, literature in my field that addressed those sorts of questions and very slowly was introduced to a book here and an article here, and realized, oh, there are other approaches. There is this thing called interpretivism, and picked up bits and pieces along the way and, you know, many years later, still aren't sure I fully grasp it all, but I like that idea that there's always more to learn, and it keeps opening up new avenues for me to explore.
- [16:55]
Nick Cheeseman
Indeed, I feel the same way. Look, among the books that you discuss at length in the book that we're discussing today is Geoffrey Tullis's the Rhetorical Presidency. So was that a book that you came across early on or later on? And how is it that it came to be essential to your thinking about the relationship between rhetoric and interpretation and the questions that you wanted to ask about into subjective meaning making?
- [17:26]
Richard Holtzman
It was a book that I came across both early on and then again in a different way later on. Jeffrey Tulis was a faculty member in my graduate department, and I read his book as a graduate student and completely missed what he was doing. He talks about meaning, and he himself will say he's not one necessarily for categorizing himself, but he says, I never really thought of myself as an interpretivist because I didn't really have any exposure to these sorts of writings. I mean, he read his Clifford Geertz, but I think it didn't go much further than that. But I read his book as a graduate student, completely misunderstood it, thought that it was just about what I've been calling sort of this mainstream approach to studying Presidential rhetoric. And I noticed also that, and I think I was swept up in this wave, that most of my colleagues or the things that I read that talked about his book were quite dismissive of his book because I don't think that they really understood it either. He's very interested in the role that Woodrow Wilson's ideas played. And in particular, I guess the short version is that Woodrow Wilson understood the President's role different than presidents had before. He understood the role as not just simply responding to public opinion, but shaping public opinion, using symbolic language, persuasive language, rhetoric to shape public opinion. And Jeff Thulis saw that as a major change, not just in how presidents behave, but a major change. He calls it a fundamental change in our form of government in the United States. It's a completely different political order that places presidents and their relationship to the American people at its center rather than Congress, which, according to the Constitution, should be the primary institution. A lot of interpretations of his book came down to disagreements with his history. Oh, well, was it Wilson? Did it happen before Wilson? Was it after Wilson? Completely missing the point of what he was saying, which is that we now do and take as normal politics that have been transformed in the United States. We take it as normal that. That the President comes and speaks regularly to the American people. We take it as normal that the President is seen as the centerpiece of American government, the sort of sun around which our polity orbits. And he's pointing out that was manufactured. And in particular, his interest is in the role of ideas and how ideas are constitutive forces in shaping our understanding of realities.
- [20:29]
Nick Cheeseman
That's really nicely summarized, the points that you've just made there, his approach. And it reminds me of a section of the book where you discuss how the Federalists, Hamilton in particular, the first paper, warns about the possibility of a rhetorical excess of demagoguery and the possibility of tyranny arising. And your observation is that, at least on Thulis's account, since Woodrow Wilson, that ceases to be relevant because of the emergence of this rhetorical presidency. So am I right in understanding, then that if we're talking about the American presidency today, the long today is, if you like, starting from Wilson onwards up to Trump? Is that how you think and talk about the American presidency when we attach this term today? Is the institution effectively remade from that period onwards? Is there a possibility, noting that your book effectively comes to an end with the first Biden administration, which is one reason we're updating it with some discussion about Trump Too, is there a way that we might come at or think about Trump, too, as remaking that American presidency that began in the Wilson period? Or do you think of it as very much a continuation, but with a different type of rhetorical practice, a strikingly different rhetorical practice of the Trump presidency compared to its predecessors?
- [22:03]
Richard Holtzman
I think I'll split that into two questions, if I could, please. So the first one is, you asked Nick about, shall we trace it back to Wilson and did we see it disappear with Biden and these sorts of things? My reading of Tulis is that to, say, a rhetorical presidency, that's not something inherent to the president itself. So the idea is instead that the rhetorical presidency is a construct that we use to interpret, to make sense of the presidency. So that's different than saying this was some sort of pre rhetorical presidency, and then this was the rhetorical presidency. I think that language makes it sound like it's something within the nature of the presidency itself, when instead, it's just a lens that we're using to interpret it. So what that means is that we may see different elements of what we'll call the rhetorical presidency reflected in the behavior and the language of certain presidents. I mean, historically, I think if someone wanted to make that argument, they would probably argue that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sort of the first, if you want to take that approach, was one of the first rhetorical presidencies in the way that he used rhetoric, and he sort of built on Wilson's ideas. From my standpoint, though, I don't get into the game of trying to determine who was, who wasn't, what that means. Instead, I'm primarily interested in making sense of contemporary politics, and I see it very much, as mentioned as a construct or a lens that gives me an interpretive tool to ask certain sorts of questions. So that can lead me then to your second question, which is this transition from the first Trump administration to Biden and into the second Trump administration. Yes, I finished writing the book. Actually, it was just before the 2024 election, is when I finished it. And after the 2024 election, I went back and I added a couple lines, just saying, President Trump has been reelected, and here's what that might mean. But it certainly was out of my hands by the time that he took office on January 20, 2025. But to go back to this idea of looking at these presidents through the lens of this construct of the rhetorical presidency, what Biden provides us is very interesting. Some may argue, oh, well, look, Biden wasn't a quote unquote rhetorical presidency. Because he wasn't a great speaker, particularly near the last, you know, in the last year, maybe even two years of his four year term, he really wasn't making very many public appearances. He wasn't someone who took advantage of media technology. And when he did speak publicly, such as the infamous, you know, debate, he really failed to communicate effectively. My reading is that the strong reaction to his inability to communicate effectively or his unwillingness to be regularly in the public eye is itself proof of this idea of the rhetorical presidency, which is that we take it as normal. And when we see someone not behaving in that way, as Biden was not, then it becomes a massive failure, as opposed to a different metric of saying, well, should we judge Biden on the policies that passed during his administration? Should we judge Biden on whether he got us into any wars? Should we judge Biden on the state of the economy? All these different possible metrics. Yet the primary one that seemed to be the focus of discussion was how he presented himself and how well he spoke or how poorly he spoke, how well he communicated. And so by the fact that he didn't meet these expectations that have been set by this idea of the rhetorical presidency, in a way, it sort of is an indicator of how powerful those ideas are.
- [26:27]
Nick Cheeseman
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- [27:08]
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- [28:00]
Nick Cheeseman
And we're back with Richard Holtzman talking about his what does the American Presidency Mean? So you were remarking on how Tullis might have read a bit of Geert and that sort of the extent to which he would have moved in the direction of the literature on interpretation. You, however, make a case for his rhetorical presidency as a lens, a term that you just used to do the kinds of work that you're interested to do as an interpretivist, attending to meaning making. And you were just offering some examples of how you go about doing that. Bring us back then to the explicitly interpretivist literature. If you're engaging with Tullis and then connecting him to the work that we associate with the interpretive, political, scientific tradition, clearly you're publishing in a series that's edited by. By Dvoriano and Peregrine Shorchi and has a number of other eminent interpretive political scientists publishing in it on a range of topics. What are the moves that you make to, if you like, build bridges or make connections between what he's doing and then what you want to do and the case that you're making for attending to meaning making in presidency studies today?
- [29:30]
Richard Holtzman
My primary effort is twofold, I think. One is I want to speak to an audience of those who study the presidency, who are largely unaware of or misunderstand or are unfortunately sometimes outright dismissive of work that doesn't follow the tenets of what I'll call methodological positivism, or that approach focused on causality. My goal in speaking to that audience was to use a book like Toolis's book, which is very well read and has various understandings or misunderstandings, but it certainly is still part of what you might call the canon in studying the presidency. I mean, and it's been around for almost 40 years now to use that as a jumping off point to explain to an audience of those who study the presidency that there's this thing interpretivism, and it's kind of been hidden in plain sight this whole time that here are some of the things that Toolis is doing in his book. And then I use other research and interpretive scholars, as you mentioned, to make those connections. So, for instance, someone like Charles Taylor, his focus on context, and that social artifacts or texts or text analogs only have meaning in relation to other texts or text analogs, and we need to understand these things in context. And that's basically a way of trying to. And you use the word bridge to build these bridges, to say, this is not such a foreign language. Interpretivism, there are these terms involved. You know, there's jargon in any academic study, I think, but there are complicated concepts involved in interpretivism that I think can turn off someone who doesn't have a welcoming door to understanding those. And so one of my efforts was to try to build those bridges, to say, hey, look, here's a book that you know about this toolless book, and you have some understanding of it. And then here's a little bit of a deeper dive into other research that's doing the same thing. It's just using different language to do that. And then the second thing that I want to do, and I think this is both for an audience of those who study the presidency, but also interpretivists in all fields who are not necessarily interested or studying the presidency or even political science, to say, in fact, there's this interpretive tradition in the study of the presidency that goes back 40 years. And it's not just Jeff Teulis, but all sorts of other scholars, David Zarevsky, who's in the field of communication speech, in particular, Anne Norton, political scientist, all sorts of different scholars who have looked at the presidency and used some aspects of an interpretive approach, more or less, and sometimes did it without explaining necessarily methodologically what they were doing, and even in some cases, and not those individuals I just mentioned, but other individuals in some cases maybe having interpretive elements to their work and not really being conscious of them. So, for instance, there's a lot of work on the historical construction of the presidency and how not just our understanding, but how the office itself has been constructed and reconstructed over time. So that was my second effort, is to try to point out, look, there is a lot of influence of key elements of interpretivism scattered throughout the study of the presidency. And there's a lot that has been gained through that research in the past. And we can only really appreciate the possible role that interpretivism can play going forward if we see what it's contributed in the past and maybe has been hidden or been referred to using other language.
- [33:51]
Nick Cheeseman
Is it for those reasons that you spend much of the first half of the book doing that work, talking the reader patiently through the alternatives? When we're thinking about political and social scientific methodologies. You do a lot of work attending to philosophical presuppositions and so on. Jargon comes in, of course, with our ontological and epistemological positions. And by the way, I'm a big defender of jargon. I'm always reminded of Wilson Follett in a fantastic book called Modern American Usage. He writes an entry on jargon where he says that the. There's nothing inherently bad about jargon. The problem is just the badness of jargon today. So there's parenthetically a defense for jargon and for your use of jargon in this book. And yet there are some colleagues in the interpretivist community who say, well, if you start out by talking about methodology, then you gotta bore some readers. You're going to give students the shits. It's much better just to get on with it and then find a way to insert a few footnotes or passing references for things they may want to go and look up later on. You clearly don't agree with that position. And is it because to go back to the start of my long question, you found it was necessary to tease it out and address it in relation to this literature where you're encountering either tacit interpretivists or people who aren't even attentive to the fact that they're doing work that you would class as interpretive. And you're inviting the reader to think and talk along the lines that you're putting forward.
- [35:32]
Richard Holtzman
So my first chapter after the introduction certainly lays out, and I'll emphasize it lays out my understanding of interpretivism, which certainly may not align with others. And I frame it in terms of a series of questions. And those are all questions that I've asked myself. Maybe another audience for this book is me as a graduate student when I was lost and struggling and trying to find my way. And I'm not even sure I knew enough to fully formulate those questions. So I thought it made sense to start off with saying, here's how I understand what I'm doing here, what I'm about to be doing here, and also what I'm the literature I'm going to be. Be discussing. And to do it in a way as much as possible, to put it in, you know, in plain. As plain language as possible and to use examples when available. I'm a teacher. I consider myself first and foremost a teacher rather than a researcher. This is my first book, I'm proud to say. I'm 52 years old and I'm happy to have written a book. Nice. Your choices. Another one. Thank you. But I mean, my self conception is as a teacher and I thought about how would I teach this? How would I explain this in terms of. In the classroom? And it would be in terms of questions. It would Be in terms of examples, would be in terms of analogies. So I did think it was important to lay that out first. And then I hope that the reader would stick with. Stick with me, make it through that, and then see it in my second chapter, which is a story. I mean, I call it a genealogy, but it's really a story of how a more positivist or methodologically positivist approach came to dominate the study of the presidency. And I was worried that that story wouldn't make sense unless I talked about, piece by piece, what interpretivism was beforehand. And the reason why is because much of the story is about a quite unfortunately dismissive approach to interpretivism and the focus on meaning. And many publications saying, this isn't real research or we're just going to ignore it. And I wanted the reader to see before they got to that story that, oh, it is real research. It's well thought out, and there's a great history to it, and there's a lot of excellent scholarship that's involved. And I was worried that if I just jumped into the story of what had happened or what continues to happen, perhaps, in presidency studies, that a clear understanding of what interpretivism actually is might be lost.
- [38:34]
Nick Cheeseman
I do want to ask briefly, before we conclude, to turn back to the latter part of the book, ask you about the title of the fifth chapter of the book. Because there you change from the title of the book instead of phrasing the question. And we've already learned that you're someone who's very attentive to the phrasing of questions. Instead of phrasing the question, what does the American Presidency mean? You ask, how does the American Presidency mean? Though I gather that this is alluding to, although you don't say so explicitly, Devora Yano's classic, How does a policy mean, which is, as we know now in its third decade since publication, what is it that this grammatical shift in this chapter of the book is doing apropos the rest of its contents?
- [39:21]
Richard Holtzman
It absolutely is a reference and homage to some extent to Dvoriano's work. I do mention her in a footnote in relation to that title, although I think it appears in the chapter before. But she was certainly in my mind with that chapter heading. The reason I chose it is because. And most of our discussion so far has been focused on how we make sense of the presidency. So it very much has been this focus of different ways of answering that question. What does the presidency mean? What's not to be lost is another main focus of the book is How Presidents Make Meaning. And so the idea of how does a presidency mean cruelly is trying to get at that question in the sense of how do presidents make meaning? How do they make meaning with what they say? How do presidents make meaning with how they appear, with what sort of background? I mean, the current president, you'll always see him in the Oval Office sitting at his desk, and no one else in the room is sitting. They're all standing behind him, right? And gold everywhere, these sorts of things. How is the president making meaning with those sorts of visual images? How does the president make meaning in terms of speeches that aren't really speeches, but they're a cross between sort of a political campaign rally and a professional wrestling event. And so I was really interested in focusing on the different ways that presidents do make meaning. And that's the chapter where in some ways it functions as a literature review. And I played with a lot of different ways of how to organize it, ultimately taking what I called a bricolage approach, which is just sort of a little bit of this and a little bit of that, mixing it all up together. But I found it fascinating that so much research has been done, as mentioned, over the past 40 years on the presidency, looking at different aspects of this question about how the president makes meaning, whether it be as mentioned before with. With rhetoric or the spectacle, but also in terms of how, when there's television programs, television shows that are about the presidency, and how. How do we gather our understanding of what the presidency is from what we see on TV or in movies? So these are all different ways that the phenomenon of the presidency, and not just the president itself, makes meaning. And I thought that Devorah's formulation of how does a policy mean? Or even the previous idea of how does a poem mean? Was quite useful in that context.
- [42:17]
Nick Cheeseman
Yes, there is a genealogy to that term, isn't there? But to stay with the policy usage and to link it to your term, before we conclude, one of the issues that we encounter here at the Australian National University when we teach students in interpretive policy analysis, including Dvorah's work and others, is that they say that. Well, yes, but policymakers and people who are interested in policy questions need data to go to an anecdote that you provide in one of the chapters in the book by which they mean numbers that are organized and represented in a way that are legible for people who don't have much time and need to make decisions and need to communicate about them publicly and so on. So the only way to sort of get things done ultimately is to concede to those terms. And we work through alternative ways of thinking and talking from an interpretive standpoint about what it means to do policy analysis and how, in fact, asking a question like how does a policy mean can be productive for those types of conversations. So in terms of your own work and potential contributions to public debate about political life in the United States, especially in the current exigencies, in the extreme circumstances that Americans are facing today, with illegal wars abroad and the militarized occupation of cities at home, what sort of contribution do you think framing questions in this way, attending to meaning can make to public debates that might affect political and social change of the sort that I'm going to suppose you and I would both want?
- [44:05]
Richard Holtzman
My hope is that introducing this sort of approach to readers who may not have been exposed to it before will encourage observers of the presidency to understand that there is much more that we can be asking important questions about. So, for example, you know, one thing that drew me to interpretivism, particularly in the study of the presidency, is that it makes space for value based assessments, right? Of sort of normative assessments of critique. Whereas not all, but, you know, some more positivist approaches say, well, we're going to be scientists about this, and there's. There's no room for personal critique to be involved. I'd love if the book could open up some space within the academy to say, well, maybe there are important questions that we should be asking here at work that align with the questions that we're asking when we're at home. So when we're at home and we're asking, does this look like an authoritarian to you? Because it sure looks like an authoritarian to me. It's okay to ask that question at work. And just because certain tools may lend themselves to exploring that question in one way and other tools may not, My hope is that the book may encourage a broadened conversation about the sorts of questions that we ask about the presidency and to open up that space to bring in that normative element. I also just end the book talking a little bit about humility, or at least mentioning the word. And I mentioned before in the chapter about interpretivism is this is my understanding of interpretivism, and there is so much I haven't had a chance to read. My life is finite, you know, my attention is finite, My time is finite, just like everybody else. And I know what I know, and here's how I see it. But I want to remain, you know, humble to the extent of, well, this is just how I see it. And I think that. But I have something interesting to add to the conversation. And the other contribution I hope the book makes is to invite others into that conversation to say that what does the presidency mean to you? That just because you haven't read all the research, 30 years worth of publications on the presidency, or that you don't read the journals in the field or these sorts of things, you still have something to contribute, particularly if, if we do live in a country here that is meant to be something akin to a democracy, that citizens should be active participants. My belief is that some of that active participation means that we're talking about these things and asking questions. And it's not just, well, this is good or bad, but really asking questions based on curiosity and asking them with humility, saying, I don't know, but this doesn't feel right, or this doesn't look right. What do you think? And so my hope is also that the book can encourage that sort of conversation. And that's maybe a long way away from measurable change to the society or to the politics in the United States. But it's the only contribution I'm able to make through my work, at least
- [47:28]
Nick Cheeseman
at this stage, as this is a podcast which has an international audience and obviously everyone knows by my accent and references I'm not an American. Do you have reflections on how what you've just said in terms of broadening the conversation and also enabling certain types of discussion, may be useful not only within the United States and among your fellow Americans, but around the world, both in relation to the American presidency, specifically, insofar as it's an imperial presidency as well as a national one, and secondarily in relation to other presidencies or other analogous institutions, political orders of a sort that might also be studied using some of the methods and with some of the lenses that you draw reader's attention to in this book?
- [48:23]
Richard Holtzman
The book was written not just for Americans or those living in this country, but it was and is intended to speak to those who are curious. So there's a section sort of right in the middle in chapter three that deals with the question of sort of what is the American presidency, and tries to lay out all of its different pieces in order to say, look, there's a lot more here than what we might normally see, what we might normally be debating about when it comes to the presidency. And yes, I do believe that the approach taken in the book is transferable to looking at different systems of government, to looking at different executives, not just in the political state, but university presidents, CEOs of corporations. I think we can ask the same sorts of questions in the sense of what does it mean to be Elon Musk? Or what does it mean to be the head of Apple or Microsoft or these sorts of things? And how do those individuals try to construct meaning? How might we critique and deconstruct what they're saying? Are they creating a spectacle, and why is that important? So while I don't explicitly lay out different ways to do that, I do believe that the ideas are transferable in that sense.
- [49:53]
Nick Cheeseman
The world's richest man didn't get to sit down in the White House either, as I recall. So you said this is your first book. Are you now inspired, energized, to write another? Or where to next?
- [50:05]
Richard Holtzman
I'm currently writing an essay on Donald Trump's rhetoric and the upcoming World cup, which will be hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada. Talk about another president who didn't get to sit in the Oval Office is the president of FIFA, which is is the global world football or soccer organization. I'm a fan of the sport and had an invitation to write something about Trump's rhetoric regarding this upcoming World cup, which may or may not happen depending on what he decides to do. He's already threatened to move it or shut it down and all sorts of other things.
- [50:41]
Nick Cheeseman
Sounds like it could be a crowd pleaser and certainly great that you can combine your own passion interest for the game with your research. And have you been reading anything recently that's caught your eye that you'd like to draw listeners attention to? Any new books or old books on your shelf that you think would be great for us to look into?
- [51:03]
Richard Holtzman
I would, and I love the opportunity to do this. So I'll suggest two old books, one quite old and one not quite as old. One is a book that I picked up by my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, and I thought I had read all Kurt Vonnegut books. And then my son, who's just starting to get into Kurt Vonnegut, picked up the book Player Piano, which is his very first book published in 1952, and it is incredible. It is written about this day and age we're living in. It is written about AI. Kurt Vonnegut was a man ahead of his time. I recommend any of his books for his critique of power, for his humanity, for his humility, and above all for his humor, which we could all use a little bit of. The second book is something which has to do, I think, also with meaning making, but from a different perspective this is by the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. It's called Peace is every step path of mindfulness in everyday life. You know, we all to some extent recreate our own world every, every morning when we wake up. And Thich Nhat Hanh has some suggestions about how we might do that. Mindfully, it's a beautiful book. It's very elegantly written and consists of these, these very short vignettes. And it's just nice to read one each morning and then start the day.
- [52:30]
Nick Cheeseman
Marvelous. Thank you. We'll make sure that those readings, perhaps one for the morning and one for the evening, are referenced on the show notes on the New Books Network website. And I'd like to thank you, Richard Holtzman, for taking the time to discuss what does the American Presidency mean?
- [52:49]
Richard Holtzman
Thank you for having me.
- [53:02]
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