Jun 11, 2009 2
David Brooks and MCP Misinformation
David Brooks says the global gag rule made no tangible difference in the way the United States conducted itself its international development efforts. He needs to read up.
drink deep
Dec 19, 2008 0
The Separated Parents Theory of American Politics
Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation has whipped up a significant amount of anger on the left. This anger is quite justified. Warren is a man who stands for the opposite of the political inclusiveness that Obama claims to be aiming for. Yet Obama’s selection is totally in keeping with the theory that has driven Obama’s whole campaign. This theory — let’s call it the Separated Parents Theory of American Politics — states that what was wrong with the last eight years of American politics — and American politics more broadly since 1968 — has been a Vietnam-fueled family squabble among liberals and conservatives. Against the Separated Parents Theory of American Politics, I present the Bad Policy Theory of American Politics. The problem with Warren is his politics. His delivering the invocation doesn’t matter because he is not being appointed to Obama’s cabinet. His invocation does matter because it suggests that Obama and those who believe in his narrative of family strife overestimate the importance of tone in their critique of the last eight years and underestimate the importance of Democratic complicity in the most horrific policies we have embraced.
Nov 11, 2008 0
Obama’s Sober Hope, Bush’s Cowboy Certitude, and the Legitimizing of Positive Ambiguity
Obama’s retrospectively vindicated opposition to dumb war in the face of supposedly airtight evidence for launching it has proven a victory not just for Obama, but for the legitimacy of ambiguity itself as a space for positive thinking in the making of serious decisions by individuals and societies. With the discrediting of certitude undergirded by the hyperspecific comes the complementary embrace of an ineluctably abstract, indefinable hope—a hope we have espoused, often reluctantly, because the sober and steady hand of the man who has become its global symbol checks its pesky quixotism.