Wonks Gone Wild

Sorry for my relative silence, but as Loco Foco noted, I spent most of the week at a gathering of progressive economic policy wonks held in Las Vegas. Let's just say that the progressive economic policy wonks clearly stood out. And the take-away message from the conference was a straightforward one: the economy sucks, and it is going to get worth before it gets better.

But that is not what I want to write about. On the long flight home, I had a chance to finish reading UNC historian Bill Leuchtenburg's classic study of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, entitled Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Though first published in 1963, the book remains remarkably engaging, readable and relevant. (The book's first chapter, The Politics of Hard Times, is worth reading in and of itself.) In many ways, Roosevelt ran a campaign similar to Obama's, and many of the same doubts were raised about both men after they won. Roosevelt then went on to transform himself, the presidency and the country.

On this blog, we talk a great deal about politics and policy, typically from a tactical or practical perspective. In other words, we often talk in terms of how to solve a particular problem. Yet we may need to be reminded from time to time of why we care. I think a quote from Roosevelt that Leuchtenburg uses to end the book is a beautiful reminder of first principles. Said Roosevelt in a 1940 speech in Cleveland:

This generation of Americans is living in a tremendous moment of history.

The surge of events abroad has made some few doubters among us ask: Is this the end of a story that has been told? Is the book of democracy now to be closed and placed away upon the dusty shelves of time?

My answer is this: All we have known of the glories of democracy -- its freedom, its efficiency as a mode of living, its ability to meet the aspirations of the common man -- all of these are merely an introduction to the greater story of a more glorious future.

We Americans of today -- all of us -- we are characters in the living book of democracy.

But we are also its author. It falls upon us now to say whether the chapters that are to come will tell a story of retreat or a story of continued advance.