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Edited on Wed Jan-11-06 01:59 PM by dusmcj
the more people who do, the greater the probability that someone will come up with something worthwhile.
Further, let's look less for transcendental effects, and more for the output of hard work (which implies doing the hard work to produce the output). The Founders were not mystical airheads (or if they were it was a hobby); when it came to getting things done they were hardnosed rationalists in the tradition of the Enlightened thinkers of their age. The Constitution and attendant documents are splendid pieces of objective reasoning, about very complex sociological subjects no less. Their core message was: this is a land which is constituted by its people, and whose institutions serve its people. There is no one exceptionally gifted to guide us, instead we are all created equal, and our nation's structure ensures that we all have access to opportunity to exercise those gifts unimpeded by group coercion. The vision we need to form is less an individual product (because if we're all off visioning there is the distinct danger that the activity degenerate into mental masturbation) and more the product of discourse and deliberation between men of good will, who commit to applying their energy and interest to the question of what structures might be established to further the common weal, first individually and then collectively in public fora.
We have been floundering around for 6 years looking for why the public uses 'liberal' as a cussword, and why we can't find anyone as cathartic and exciting as Reagan or Jerry Falwell. We've forgotten how to be matter-of-fact and hardnosed to the simple extent of acknowledging that the conservatives have no intellectual content and are trying to substitute loud mouths and aggression for it, that they are making war on normalcy and on every advance in human civilization made by hard effort over the last few thousand years. Once we come to terms with this and stop looking for dialog and being nice, we will recall that this battle has been fought before, for example by the labor movement of the last century, that the New World Order is really the Old World Ordure, that the players are the same, and that the solutions identified by the kind of leaders you seek, like FDR, still hold: the impulse of men to seek what they identify as their self-interest without adding the salt of enlightenment must be controlled, that some will control it of their own accord, but others will not and so it cannot be left to goodwill. And that there are higher priorities than letting everyone get as wealthy as they can, and that in fact the satisfaction of basic needs, including national needs, is accomplished poorly by free markets. So that government, as the product of millenia of arduous deliberation by our ancestors about equitable social structures, has an obligation to be an expression of enlightened collective, public thought about what legal structures to establish to ensure that national missions - ensuring a decent quality of life for all citizens, advancing culture and science, relating productively with other nations, defending against illegitimate aggression - are executed successfully, to ensure that the public interest is served by the structures the public chooses to erect.
(Note how different this is from the US conservative notion that government is some offensive anachronism to be kicked with contempt into a dumpster.)
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