In the midst of the joy, a quiet reminder that hope is not quite enough.
I couldn’t count the number of times I heard the words “transformational” or “inspirational,” or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade’s war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism?by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions?”convenient” because such redefinition makes those questions seem easier to answer, “dangerous” because this was a time when the nation was least prepared to afford easy answers.
It might not be ‘politics as usual’, but it’s still going to be politics. Deals will be done, compromises reached, bad things will happen. Let’s hope the bien-pensants don’t succeed in smothering the Obama presidency in the treacle they used for Kennedy. Then we won’t have to wait a generation to find out what happened. I’m too old to wait.
