Cockeyed Platonist (CP) titles his latest political essay ‘The Quest for Dignity’. His penchant for the overarching abstraction, the form of his thought, his intellectual modus vivendi is again manifested. We are treated to this argumentative reductionism, again, in his idea of ‘the great mental tide’ that he postulates as occurring some fifty years ago. In sum a suspicion of ‘trusted authority’ and the belief in a ‘fixed place in the social order’ as no longer viable. That would, perhaps, place this notion outside the memory of most of his readership, making it attractively out of a manifest critical scrutiny that could be exercised by a historically sophisticated reader, or even an aging reader with recall.  He continually refers to a ‘people’ and a ‘they’ both remaining undefined, un-described and tantalizingly amorphous. This is speculating pseudo-philosophizing of the most trivializing kind, but the expression of an intellectual pragmatism bordering on the mythical, even the Hegelian: a happenstance of his style of argument?  These critical evaluations are fascinating in themselves, but we must move further into the essay, to plum its depths, if any. One primary idea is the ‘freedom recession’ defined as: ‘more governments retreating from democracy than advancing toward it’ ; this all being a mere introduction to critiques of Hillary Clinton and The Obama Administration for being confused and seemingly ineffective in the Egyptian Crisis.  CP links to a set of imperatives issued by the Working Group for Egypt and characterizes its recommendations as ‘smart and concrete’, again undefined, which upon reading , a two page report,  seems to be stating the absolutely obvious; garnished with the signatures of  the appropriately credentialed experts, an issue paramount in CP’s world view. A critic could safely say two thing of this essay: the abstractions are capacious enough to accommodate what passes for analysis and that the cliché is in the hands of a man wholly enamored of its seductive intellectual power.