Carroll, you're strange. I can understand someone saying that there is no direction at all in history, so that neither the notions of progress nor regress make make, but to say that regress is possible but not progress is just pessimistic posturing, a literary trope with which you of all people should be very familiar.
However, but progress I mean that things are in some respects better than they were, and unlike you I don't build in a requirement that it doesn't count as progress unless we can be sure of a "ratchet effect" -- an ugly phrase, but one which I take it means that the gains cannot be lost. Given that view, actually, it is no wonder that you believe in regress but not progress, since it is always possible that gains will be lost, there can never be any progress by definition, even if we achieve the socialist paradise.
This is, as I say, posturing. Twenty years ago, when I worked on the Jesse Jackson campaign, it was conventional wisdom and political reality that no African-American could be a serious major party candidate for president because (the subtext went) the country is just too racist. Today, that is not true. Now the candidate in question is a bright, ambitious charming, pleasant noncommittal centrist without the courage of his convictions, but that was not really the issue, was it?
It sort of raises the bar to say, "No strongly liberal or radical African American candidate could be a serious major party contender." Fact is, we are still working on the possibility of getting a strong or even at this point a traditional old-fashioned liberal (like Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford ;->) as a serious contender. That regardless of the candidate's race, sex, color, religion, or whatever.
Obama's no prize. But what did you expect? I actually expected that the first serious African American candidate would be a conservative Republican. It's a nice bonus that he's a moderately liberal Democrat with a strongly liberal past, btw. And it is progress, that is, better than it was in 1988, that so far as one can tell Obama's race plays in mainly with worries about whether he's "black enough," rather than leading to his being written off altogether.
Most likely to go to war with Iran? Don't even tell me what you have been smoking. No one is going to war with Iran. I suppose you base this delirium on the fact that of all the candidates in the field, Obama is the only one who opposed the Iraq war early on, but I don't really want to know. I also don't want to get into the debate about the Democrats, I've said my piece on that for this cycle, and I should not have raised the issue at all, so I apologize for doing that.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> >But isn't it a reflection of progress that
> > he's on the map at all?
>
> I guess I don't believe in progress -- which I would
> define as a
> improvement plus a rachet effect. Within a give
> epoch one has lurching
> to & fro, and possibly regress, but progress doesn't
> make sense.
>
> > And for all that he wouldn't
> > do a hundredth of what we'd hope, would you prefer
> > McCain or Giuliani or Romney or anyone the GOP has
> on
> > the table? Or say it would make no difference?
> Really
> > truly?
>
> It depends on how you view a war with Iran. Obama of
> all the candidates
> is most apt to launch such a war. I would guess the
> best hope for
> getting out of Iraq is McCain.
>
> Carrol
>
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