The 2012 presidential election is fundamentally a contest between our future and our past. Barack Obama’s America is the America that will be; Mitt Romney’s is the America that was. And the distance between the two is greater, perhaps, than in any election we’ve had since the Civil War.
Meyerson is right about the distance between the two parties.
But he is dead wrong about this contest between our future and our past.
Decades ago, conservatives stopped to want to conserve the unbearably progressive present to instead rewind to somewhere in the past when things were simpler. The recipe sold well and morons like Reagan and Thatcher got elected.
Most progressives decided to level the battle field by defending the present instead of promoting the future. They were the new conservatives fighting the regressives. And shallow men like Clinton and Jean Chrétien got elected. Let’s keep things as they are and hope that everything will turn out fine.
The 2012 election is not different. The decision between Romney and Obama is between the past and the present.
If you want to aim at the future, if you want society to evolve to, say, address climate change, you need to look out of the mainstream. Because candidates of the mainstream only have denial or procrastination to offer to fight climate change.
If you’re tired to ride a dead horse, you oughta look elsewhere.
