StephenKMackSD's Blog

Definition: George F. Will = In the weedy field of The American Republic stands the singular effloresce that is Mr. Will. He presents himself as the channeled spirit of Edmund Burke, the great English parliamentarian. Burke was a man and a thinker with a largeness of spirit and humanity, a defender of hereditary power as demonstrative of an inherent benevolence. Although Mr. Will has never demonstrated the breadth and depth of the Burkian political/moral sensibility, he continues to strike politic poses garnished with the apt quotation from his intellectual master, without, in the least, demonstrating any coherent understanding of Burke, the man, the moralist, the politician, except as a handy rhetorical prop to enrich his political nay saying.

Definition: Obamaism = A case of overwhelming political timidity or utter lack of faith in your own political vision or simple opportunism. One can parse this adjective in so many ways, it is a truly elastic concept. It encompasses Clinton, Holbrooke, Geithner,  Summers ; it could be synonymous with Clintonism or  New Democrat; an intellectual concept as big tent.      

Definition: New Democrat =  A conscious decision to forget the New Deal as the authentic ‘Third Way’ and for reasons of personal political ambition, to court the oligarchs, the plutocrats and the kleptocrats. All the while propagandizing your virtue as expressive of a necessary realpolitik-a two dollar word for political opportunism.    

Definition: Reaganism = The self-willed forgetting of the suffering of others and the political power to make that suffering irrelevant to  the America’s civic endeavor.