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Stepping Forward
I liked this part from one of Matthew Yglesias's posts regarding Barack Obama's win of the Democratic nomination:
Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.
(Emphases mine.) If the 90s were an era of hope, then the generation formed during that era--my generation--may very well have a fundamental and unshakable belief in our ability to fix the future. As we come of operational age--not just the age to cast votes, but the age to move and shake--we may demand a sea change in liberal attitudes.
I have a friend whose physicist father likes to note that knowing a solution is possible is a huge help to finding that solution. In an arena as complex as, oh, fixing the world, finding future "solutions" requires both a healthy attachment to facts and evidence and a healthy ability to guess and approximate, to dare, to insist. Can we balance these demands, dramatically changing our future course without succumbing to either foolhardy risk or mind-numbing caution? I think the answer is yes, yes we can.
Comments (7)
I have to admit (unsurprisingly, probably to most who know me) to a lot of cynicism, but I can see your point, especially the way that it has been put here. Still, I don't believe Hillary Clinton thinks it's impossible to accomplish things in the world-- I think she just believes that, to do so, you have to play the game and make compromises. Even though I probably cynically lean more towards that notion, I am idealistically hopeful that Obama can refute that. If that makes any sense. ;)
On one final cynical note, I'll say this- if the 90s were an era of hope, the 2000's have really damaged a lot of our hopes. Let's hope this decade can end on a more positive note, however.
Posted on Jun-06-2008 | Link
I would be interested to know if he is a theoretical or an experimental physicist? Is he speaking about the existence of a mathematical solution to a problem of physics that then makes the experimentation more confident/credible/... ?
Posted on Jun-24-2008 | Link
Let's try this again.
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I would be interested to know if he is a theoretical or an experimental physicist. Is he speaking about the existence of a mathematical solution to a problem of physics that then makes the experiment more confident and/or the experiment more credible?
Posted on Jun-24-2008 | Link
You always assume a solution exists. even in algebra, you say X is the solution, then you solve for X.
Posted on Aug-06-2008 | Link
from pharyngula:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/friday_cephalopod_soaring.php
as I vaguely recall you said you like Octupi
Posted on Jan-16-2009 | Link
I gotta say that an unshakable belief that we can fix the future seems like a good thing to me. I sometimes wonder if nations (*cough* Pakistan *cough*) lack that, at least perhaps in individuals? Maybe that's why the bouncing between a finite number of politicians, rather than adopting an outlier revolutionary (*cough* Imran Khan *cough*).
Posted on Jan-26-2009 | Link
I wonder now if Yglesias and the rest of the blogorrheacs will apologize for their slandering of Hillary and the misguided and completely wrong deification of Obama's idealism. What they (and Obama) derided as Clinton's third way, they praise as nuance and pragmatism with Obama.
Posted on Jul-13-2009 | Link