Perhaps we’ll be able one day soon to discuss why the philosophy of history holds that every civilization gets only one idea, and what that means for Americans and the American idea, never just the last best hope but also the absolute danger, impossible to be one without also being/becoming the other…
David Sessions explains why he is going to vote for Obama this Fall, even though, put simply, he believes the Whole Thing is an atrocity – that the politcal system and the security state are sources of evil, and so on. He implicitly describes his own orientation in one telltale phrase: “committed to radical inclusion both domestically and internationally.” A truly “radical” policy of “inclusion” equates with the total dissolution not just of the nation-state but of politics itself. As such, it is also utopian: a radical inclusiveness indistinguishable from radical self-exclusion: uttered irrelevancy except, unless, and only where located or discovered within the prior principle of the sacrificial community – the nation – that the utopian presumes to reject, as though a mental act of negation severs actual bonds: The author is forced to divide his mind between self-gratifyingly totalized verbal gestures and an incremental “humanitarian” return to the real that is little different from anyone else’s relation to conventional politics: sacred imagination, banal adulthood. What would be radical, but remains tantalizingly unavailable, drawing us into its vanishing wake, is to see them at once, and join them.
Realistically, a merely more rather than ideally realistic policy may be as much as is really achievable, and for any realist president will remain the ideal.
What could better capture the nihilistic impetus of philosophical liberalism – individualized instrumental reason – than its discovery of the moral impossibility of human reproduction itself?
Any opinion we form on the exception is an opinion we form about and for ourselves, of and in our own interest. Non-dialectical political science is purely pseudo-science on this matter that would be most important to it, if only it could ever remove itself from the inquiry, but every attempted movement away from the center of discussion converts necessarily and immediately into a new problem for the selfsame discussion, a new proposition of the included, the excluded, and the difference. The discussion is the tracking of this motion: We continue it for the sake of putting our prejudices to tests for them to fail. Suspicion or resistance on the part of the reader must also vary with his or her own also inextricably compromised position.
The approach I’m recommending would require some overall guidance, based on a much more detailed consideration than I have attempted here, but it would not require a single, all-or-nothing effort at any particular phase. Much might depend on the sophistication, capacities, and enthusiasm of individual sub-bloggers, but each blog would remain “small enough to fail” without doing much harm to the larger enterprise. On the other hand, any particular sub-blog or even sub-network of sub-blogs could end up growing far beyond the current limits of the League. The result could convey the Gentlemen’s characteristic commitment to liberty and human scale, and indeed to diversity, the latter being something which the League has thusfar been extraordinarily successful in achieving on the level of ideology, if much less so in other ways.
