Making Friends With Your Past Political Self

By Kleinheider Posted on December 17, 2008 at 2:29 pm

Rob Robinson discusses his political evolution:

A good friend of mine once passed along advice from his father: “Be a Democrat while you’re young, and a Republican when you’re older.”

Although I reserve the right to vote for whomever I think is most fit for office, regardless of political affiliation, I’ve taken that advice, only in reverse. I’m much more liberal, progressive or whatever you choose to call it today than I was in 1991, but I think my eighteen-year-old self and I would still be able to be friends. Even in my more conservative days, what mattered to me most were compassion and character. That much hasn’t changed, and I hope it never does.

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Tags: change, Ideology, Political evolution  

Defending Ideology

By Kleinheider Posted on November 30, 2008 at 9:12 pm

In the wake of President George W. Bush:

But what’s more striking still is the elevation of managerial competence to the highest possible qualification for political office. Obviously, after eight years of nepotistic croynism, competence does look like a breath of fresh air. And I can understand, as well, the automatic suspicion of “ideology” (a word that has a very precise meaning in much political theory, thus making it a bit difficult for me to use it the way it is used in ordinary political commentary….but I’ll try…) after eight years of delusional neoconservative true believers. But politics cannot, finally, be reduced merely to technical management and administration. Means must be deployed in the service of particular ends, and the choice of those ends can never be specified purely by managerialism. In the midst of a serious crisis, some ends are beyond dispute: get the economy back on track. But what does that actually mean? What does a well-functioning economy look like? Only a political - only what mainstream commentators call an ideological - vision can actually answer that question. Is a healthy economy measured entirely by corporate profits? The people in charge of “righting” the economy must have answers to these questions before they can put their much-ballyhooed seriousness and competence to work - and our collective obsession with technocratic skill obscures the answers to these questions. Indeed, it prevents us from even asking these questions.

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Tags: Ideology, managerialism, technocracy