Et tu, E.J. Dionne?
Must be something in the water.
E.J. Dionne and Thomas Sowell, both in one day, write pieces of real substance, absent narrow partisan interpretations of the world and the people in it.
No Monopoly on Hope
And E.J.'s conclusion - that McCain's emphasis on fear rather than hope as a more noble, and thusly effective, animating spirit for Americans and for people, generally - is a spot-on reflection on the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Fear is the seed of its own undoing, often, when it is used to manipulate others. All manipulation is its own undoing, at it turns out, when people wise up to being manipulated.
Soft power. Hard power. Whatever means of manipulation is engaged.
Conscience, in the end, is what animates human beings and the liberal democracies that best facilitate the development of that conscience.
Doubt that? Keep watching.
And you might want to consult some of the many, many people who made possible our ability to think it, express it, and live in a world that takes it seriously.
2 comments:
E.J. Dionne is one of my favorite liberal writers. Being a conservative, I can't stand the HuffPo, the daily Kooks, etc. But E.J. is a well-reasoned man. I rarely agree with his conclusions, but I admire his intellectual honesty.
Yeah, I have to agree, foutsc. Actually, foutsc, you give a lot more credit to E.J. than I have given him in the last couple of years.
I share E.J.'s concern about people who are struggling. I work with kids with serious behavior and mental health issues, and most of them come from families with relatively less money.
But E.J. has really irked me with his self-righteous attitudes about wealth equity in the last couple of years. I used to share his views. But I guess it's because I've just gotten tired of liberals always assuming that they should fault someone else for the problems of the poor rather than what, in my experience, is a far more productive and reasonable route, which is to put responsibility for our financial situations in the lap of each person, rich or poor, where it is most likely to be changed in the most serious ways. My experience working with kids and families from lower income backgrounds is that talking with them about choices they can make to improve their financial situations is a far more productive route than moralizing at rich people about their greed, especially a lot of rich folks who help pay for a lot of the programs that are meant to serve those with less money.
So this piece was actually a really refreshing piece for me to read because it was the first one in a long time from E.J. that was not assuming bad faith on the part of conservatives or rich people, which does seem to be the liberal modus operandi that has really begun to bug me, over the years.
I'm sure E.J.'s got money and he sees other monied peoples wasting all kinds of money when lots of people have basic needs going unmet. But as a person who works with a lot of poor folks, and who grew up poor, myself, I just think it's a much more productive route to teach people to take charge of their own financial affairs, to save and invest for their futures, to read Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor - the very readable book that is the basis for Warren Buffet's wealth - and go take care of your financial affairs rather than the destructice politics that so often surrounds matters of wealth.
I really think we need to move in that direction if our politics is going to be a more thoughtful place where we are focussed on what government really can do well rather than constantly debating all the things that government makes only a very marginal impact compared to what individuals can and need to do for their own lives.
Thomas Sowell is much more in line with me, on that point. But Sowell, too, like most folks, I think, has been too focussed on trying to assert that someone or some group has all the right answers when they clearly don't.
And that article he wrote about intellectuals was a nice corrective to that notion.
I hope both of these guys keep it up. It would make for much more rational discourse about policy, I think.
In the meantime, my work is focussed on transcending this nonsense, just as Thomas Hobbes sought to transcend the destructive politics between Protestants and Catholics in 17th century Great Britain. We think it's ridiculous, today, that either of these two groups would act as if they have some kind of claim to better wisdom about governance. I think the same is true of liberal and conservative ideology, today, and my work seeks to integrate what I think are the best ideas in both ideologies centered around our strongest liberal democratic values.
So, in the meantime, it's nice to watch partisans try to leave that legacy behind, some. It doesn't serve any of us, I don't think. And it blinds us with some notion that we have more answers than we do, I think.
Hopefully, one day, my children or grandchildren will be able to engage in a more thoughtful and rational politics.
We'll see if this is a first step or not.
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