Our political system is decidedly anti-utopian, which is one reason conservatives love it so. It assumes that even the most decent men will act out of self-interest. The Constitution doesn’t deny men’s flaws, but relies upon them. It sets ambition against ambition, faction against faction, in the hope that negatives will cancel out and leave room for wisdom…
The Left’s problem is that it has no limiting principle to its idealism. It may deny that it is utopian, and some liberals even recognize the folly of utopianism in the abstract. But those same liberals will not tell their idealistic cohorts to abandon utopianism. It is too useful in motivating those who do not so much thin their way through politics as feel…
President Obama and his defenders claim that he has failed in his efforts to begin an era of new politics solely because his opponents refused to grant him everything he wanted. The hubris of that argument is breathtaking. The president’s expectation that in a properly functioning constitutional democracy he would win every battle bespeaks an ignorance and an arrogance the likes of which we haven’t seen in the Oval Office for a century…
He once campaigned on unity and idealism, and is now in every breath spitting the bile of demonization and disunity.
Conservatives know better. Because we never dreamed of making a perfetsociety, we’ve come to appreciate a good society. The utopian protesters occupying tither and yon look at this good society and curse it. President Obama plays them for fools, telling them that all that stands between them and their objective is his political “enemies.“
from Intelligent Idealism, by Jonah Goldberg in the Feb 6 issue of NR.
New favorite phrase: “tither and yon”.