A right-liberal weighs a left-liberal in the balance, and finds him wanting

Scott at Powerline reflects on Obama’s reflections on Lincoln, and finds two things: Obama’s intellectual vacuity, and his subscription to the standard left-liberal view of life as progress without truth: “Obama finds in Lincoln no fixed idea that explains his understanding or his acts. Lincoln is simply the avatar of a progressive future that is unbounded by the limits of any fixed idea.” And what do neocons like Scott believe in? A progressive future that is unbounded by any limits except for a fixed idea, namely the idea of universal democracy. And if that’s not bad enough, let us recall that the neocons’ idea, since it’s an abstract universal untethered to any concrete particularity, is automatically surrendered as soon as the alien and unassimilable particularities ushered in by the universal idea manifest their particularity, e.g., the Bush administration making openings toward Hamas after Hamas won the elections that Bush insisted they be allowed to participate in; e.g., the neocons signing on to “sharia democracy” after discovering that the Iraqis when given a democratic choice chose sharia; e.g., neocons’ celebration of nonwhites’ racial identification with Obama that made possible the expanded national unity at Obama’s inauguration. What we have, then, between the Democrats and the neocons, is a choice between a progressive future that is unbounded by the limits of any fixed idea, and a progressive future that is unbounded by the limits of any fixed idea. Your vote.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 16, 2009 01:32 PM | Send