Could any American politician write something this good?
There’s a fantastic editorial by Canadian MP Michael Ignatieff in the NYT today. A few quotes:
“The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting.”
“The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.”
“Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology.” [He goes on, without explicitly saying so, to basically endorse the paleoconservative critique of the Iraq War, not the DailyKos critique. Definitely worth reading, coming from a Canadian member of the Liberal Party.]
And best of all: “The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid.” [So, are political scientists doing the right thing by talking about Theory all the time, or are historians really on the right track?]
on August 5th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Good find, Will.
Personally, my personal favorite quote is: “Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.”