Quote of the Day

Actually I'll give you two from the same post and just have you go read the rest since it makes the argument more clearly than anything else I've seen this election season.

QOTD 1:

First, it’s not vital that an ideology be entirely consistent or empirically well-grounded for it to win broad appeal. I recently read a brief little introductory textbook on political philosophy, written by a British professor. He dealt with all the classics – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, etc. For every one of these thinkers he was able to present a devastating counterargument (usually formulated by some later philosopher) that uncovered a fatal hole in the original author’s thesis. And these are the great thinkers of the Western tradition! Proving that a system of thought has serious flaws does not prove that the system is gibberish. That’s why the philosophy journals are still to this day publishing arguments by modern-day Lockeans, utilitarians, Marxists, etc., trying to improve and refine their arguments.

QOTD 2:

But there’s still that lingering question of whether an ideology is even necessary for success. I can’t prove that it is. But I’ll say this. In the long term, politics only really changes because of passionate minorities. Only superficially is it affected by the average median swing voter. When passionate minorities take shape – sociologists call them social movements – they exert a powerful, gravitational force on the rest of the public.
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Here’s my point: There has never in history been such a thing as a genuine movement committed to pragmatism and throwing the bums out. It can only happen with an ideology, a creed.

No ideology, no movement. No movement, no change in conventional wisdom.

No change in conventional wisdom and we will be alternating between Bushism and Clintonism – between 2002 and 1997 -- for the rest of our lives.