Modernity and its Discontents

Greg Weiner, “The Moralistic Style in American Politics,” National Affairs, No. 41, Fall 2019.   As an addition to the above, Weiner suggests that a “moralistic politics is prone to stalemate because it disdains such instruments of effective political practice as barter and compromise.   Its insistence on its own correctness, elevated to the urgency of the moral plane, makes compromise not merely imprudent but indefensible.   Because of its tendency toward a monomaniacal focus on single issues to the exclusion of others, it cannot engage in horse trading.”   When it comes to the current president, who engages in a moralistic politics, there are any number of ironies.   Perhaps the most obvious is the self-perception as a “deal maker,” which tends to imply “barter and compromise” – a   pragmatism that “sees shades of gray and operates in a world of contradictions and tensions” – and, as a consequence, aims for the so-called “win-win” solution to a pro...

              SOURCES OF INSTABILIITY By way of brief introduction, I am a reader, a somewhat compulsive reader, and what populates this blog are nothing more than my marginal notes on what I’ve read.   That said, there is a framework, one that I’ve drawn from Daniel Bell’s study, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.   In it, Bell quotes Sm M. Lipset as saying, “legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.”   Moreover, Lipset goes on to say, “the extent to which contemporary democratic political democratic system are legitimate depends in large part on the ways the key issues which have historically divided the system have been resolved,” and here I would add resolved if not permanently, once and for all, then at least temporarily.   Implicit in the notion of historic...