The Better Hour

While if is fashionable to decry ideology, ideology is in fact the evidence of well thought out positions on the questions of the day. At its best these positions are firmly rooted in political philosophy. Absent this intellectual foundation the actors on our national political stage are left with no vision of the drama they should craft, but let there be no doubt that drama will ensue.

We are seeing plenty of drama right now. In the last few months it has become apparent that the intellectual underpinnings of the Republican party collapsed years ago. There is no champion of true conservative, let alone libertarian thought on the national stage. Even the free market conservatives are holding their heads down. On the other side it does not seem that there has ever been an effective champion of pro American Liberal thought during my adult life. Voters were in the 2008 election were left with a choice between an erratic septuagenarian and a change candidate from Chicago.

This does not mean that the members of our political class are idle. They have in their hands the tool of state intervention and they intend to use it. In better times we would like to think that conservatives would wield this tool like a scalpel to separate the state from the life of the nation. We might hope that reformers, progressives or whatever they are calling themselves these days, would scrape away at those persistent injustices. What we are seeing is the political class wielding state intervention like a chain saw in the hands of gran mal epileptic.

posted by Y.H.N.