Okay, maybe not the perfect pic, but I couldn't resist
I stumbled upon this quote from Arthur Schlesinger's 1949 work The Vital Center on a number of sites recently, and I think it's relevant to some of the problems in current governance I've written about here before. Like most problems, these aren't anything new, just a magnification of and inability to deal with what's always existed.
I disagree with Schlesinger on plenty of issues, but this is dead on. He was talking about a particular tendency — one he dubbed "the Doughface" — in modern leftist movements and one that, sadly, seems to have only grown, but the insight should be extended to any stupidly perfectionist strain of politics run rampant in our Breaking Time:
The weakness of impotence is related to a fear of responsibility — a fear, that is, of making concrete decisions and being held to account for concrete consequences. Problems are much simpler when viewed from the office of a liberal weekly than when viewed in terms of what will actually happen when certain ideologically attractive steps are taken. Too often the Doughface really does not want power or responsibility. For him the more subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism, the lost cause, the permanent minority, where he can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world. Politics becomes, not a mean for getting things done, but an outlet for private grievances and frustrations. The progressive once disciplined by the responsibilities of power is often the most useful of all public servants; but he, alas, ceases to be a progressive and is regarded by all true Doughfaces as a cynical New Dealer or a tired Social Democrat.
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