What a 21st Century Politics Looks Like
Why We Need to Radically Reimagine Both Conservatism and Liberalism (If We Want to Make It)
It’s easy to be a cynic these days. The world doesn’t just appear to be falling apart — it is. That’s because our leaders are incompetent, and that’s because our institutions don’t work, and that’s because our systems are broken, and that’s because, at root, our ideas are out of juice. They are badly obsolete now, the ways that we think about the world.
Foremost among the old, busted ideas that are obsolete now — there are many, from capitalism, to violence, to social Darwinism, to selfishness, to greed — are our political ideas. But I don’t mean this in the way we’ve been accustomed to thinking about politics — as a kind of strategic game, in which the most corrupt and malicious vie for power, and we, the people, try to choose the lesser evil among them. I don’t mean politics in the way that pundits or journalist or even American intellectuals do at all.
I mean politics in the old sense, the ancient form, in its timeless and true meaning. In the beginning, politics simply meant something like: “our shared quest for a good life.” Politics is probably Western culture’s great innovation — the idea that the good life was something to be deliberately and consciously organized, to…
