For a change, my own thoughts

We can only hope that, as I read in Saratogaspirit, our predicament will only spark a more lively and energized activism. Only at this late time of the day, though well before midnight, am I finding resources to even contemplate the future.

If nothing else we can conclude that the USA awoke today more Republican; not only Republican, but the nasty, barking kind of Republicanism that so repels the rest of the world. It was not always so. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. In the early part of the twentieth century the Republican elite, in the words of Colin Kidd in the London Review of Books, were “the stereotypical Episcopalian financiers of the Northeast...with no quarrel with Darwinism or abortion and made uneasy by the party’s deference to trailer-park religiosity.” The present first family includes a recent example of this breed: George Herbert Walker Bush, also known as 41. As Kidd explains: “Conviction politics played little part in the career of the elder Bush, who had a reputation of being somewhat ‘center of center’.” He was known to uphold the principles of “high-minded northeastern Republicanism associated with the Bush dynasty.” Birth control was one of the causes that deserved their solid patrician support. Prescott, the dynasty’s senatorial grandfather, “was a member of Planned Parenthood, and George H. W. Bush was so enthusiastic in the dynastic cause during his early years in Congress that he earned the nickname “Rubbers.”

The big question that now should engage us is determining what the future holds for us progressives. For me progressivism means building a society that cares above all for solidarity among those that live in it, where the ambitions of the more gifted are systematically harnessed to needs of the less fortunate, beyond mushy expressions like “a thousand points of light” or “compassionate conservatism." In such a community security means not protective walls and self defence but a reliable network of services for all.

Does this sound old-fashioned? No wonder: it flows directly from “Fraternity, equality and liberty” of the enlightened revolution.Those words have never been bested.