I’m pretty excited to have run across Douglas Rushkoff’s weblog. I’ve really enjoyed his books over the years, and it’ll be nice to see what he’s thinking from day to day. He has a recent post entitled No Surrender. In it, he describes the dilemma of the Progressives. They just lost national elections to the Republicans. As they see it, Bush sold the red states enough mythology to get the poor people there to vote against their economic interests and to send their kids off to die in a war that has yet to be adequately justified. That 80% of Bush’s supporters seem to think Hussein was involved with 9/11 is evidence that a good line of bull trumps objective reason at the polls. He describes the leftie handwringing and the temptation to go the way of mythology to win elections.
What I enjoyed about the entry was his recognition that the Progressives have their roots in the Enlightenment. It’s probably a bad idea to try to betray that heritage in an effort to promote it. The Enlightenment was about the recognition that man best promotes his condition by recognition of observed truth rather than through obedience to revealed dogma. The real world is scary, though, and fairy tales can be comforting.
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