The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the
reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the
world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that
reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.''
I think that everyone in the lefty blogosphere is familiar with that
anonymous 2002 quote in Ron Suskind's New York Magazine piece, later
rumored to be by Karl Rove. In
fact, the whole "reality-based community" label adopted by many in the
lefty blogosphere came from that one
quote. It's come to stand in for almost everything that's
wrong with the Republican Party: divorced entirely from actual facts,
contemptuous of expertise, based entirely in the notion that mere will
is sufficient to change the world. And the strong form of
that statement, which is the form apparently embraced by the Republican
Party, is basically the foundation of a destructive insanity.
There's a weak form
of the principle stated in that quote, though, and that weak form
should shame most of the
institutional Democrats in the United States, and certainly most in
California.
A few months ago, Washington Monthly published The New Vision, by venerable JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson. While certainly a powerful message, I believe Mr. Sorenson's speech failed to directly address three pressing tactical issues facing the country at this point: our lack of a clear, distinct and progressive economic program, the need for a broader and more participatory politics, and how we might begin to rebuild our shattered faith in government. These issues were also addressed to varying degrees in Matt Bai's The Argument.
In the discussion following these two works, it seemed clear that the left certainly does have an Argument, but that argument just isn't sharply focused enough to work as a political force. The following post (and this accompanying slide presentation) is the speech I'd like to hear, and an explicit attempt to refine that focus.
The High Road: Principles for a 21st Century Economy
Dan Ancona
October 1st 2007
We stand here together today near a turning point in the American and global economy. Globalization, the information economy and planetary environmental degradation are forcing us to confront new and difficult challenges; planetary scale challenges unlike any that human society has faced. Like all difficulties, these new difficulties contain opportunities, and the opportunities before us are planetary-scale as well. Technology is unlocking new forms of cooperation and expanding the limits of human potential, but our democracy has not adapted to these profound changes.
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