The social contract is signed in blood.
#Obama
What they do not want to know about American democracy
Posted in Featured, Politics, The Exception, War Tagged with: Democratic Party, DNC, Michael Tracey, Obama, Popular Sovereignty, The American Conservative
Abuse and real use of the first drafts of history (liberalism vs the exception 3)
We are hostages to the decision, including our own collective decision on one “decider” as opposed to another. Articles like Lewis’, if they reinforce our confidence in the existent rather than the ideal executive, help us to accommodate ourselves to a void in the law and its effects: The existence of this void can serve our needs; or it can be hemmed in politically – which is to say partially and provisionally; or it can be survived until the day it happens to kill us – but it cannot be legislated or reasoned way. So we can expand our general observation on liberalism – including the liberalism that advertises its libertarian purism or its republican virtues or its partisan conservatism, with or without the tri-corner hats and Minuteman costumes: As we know, it has nothing interesting to say about these issues. It does, however, very much like to pretend that it does.
after the DNC
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…
Posted in Politics Tagged with: American Idea, communitarianism, individualism, Obama, Philosophy of World History
non-ideally realistic is the ideal realism and real idealism etc.
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.
Posted in International Relations, Politics, War Tagged with: Foreign Policy, Libya, Obama, realism, War
The Theory of O
For present purposes, it may well be that nothing as ideologically coherent as an authentically left program or for that matter as Tea Party “federalism” (or Romney-Ryan free market devolution) can be implemented in the United States of America. The Theory’s very adequacy to the political moment may therefore be identical with its inadequacy to greater challenges that the American political system, maybe the American nation-state itself as presently constituted, cannot even recognize, much less successfully confront. From this point of view, the apocalypse would be not what was avoided via the Showdown, but what the showdown showed us through a crack in the blinds, something that cannot forever be voted in or out or up or down, hidden under a “tarp,” or put off until another year or two for further putting off for another year or two…
In case you missed the Prez’s speech today, or just would like a little more, here’s a sing-along musical version (content warning)
Remember him, remember his song, remembers his tire iron, remember his enchanting thong.
…and then the Prez can deliver an adhan from the White House balcony!
If we had significant constituency of Islamophobic nut-jobs in the U.S., I might be less positive about the idea.
Brother Double Fantasy
In Huntsman – a callow, hesitant, and incoherent politician whose every word and gesture betray his status as a son of immense privilege and thoroughly suppressed urges to rebel – liberals, but not lefties, glimpse victory twice over: A significant electoral victory to come, one in which all of their splendid arguments and insights receive a favorably dispassionate presentation; and a victory already won, of a political discourse defined entirely on liberal terms, endlessly to their liking.
Caesarobamism (On Those Recess Appointments)
What the Republicans have done is an example of the kind of challenge to self-governance that, multiplied out over the course of years, amidst waning national self-confidence and general and overwhelming skepticism regarding public institutions, would eventually, of necessity, likely prompt someone to cross the Potomac, destroying the DC Village even while intending, or pretending, to save it.