In one of last year's cheekiest works of social criticism, Russell Jacoby argued that what ails modern politics is a lack of utopian thinking (The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, Norton). Politics has become dull, according to Jacoby. We live in a time of "political exhaustion and retreat," of "collapsing intellectual visions and ambitions." With the death of socialist hopes, politics has lost its left wing. A direct result, says Jacoby, is that liberalism has become "spongy and vague," "earnest and woozy," and suffers from "waning determination and imagination."

And now a word of discouragement. Abandon hopes, all ye who look to the nation's journalists to lead the way through the valley of darkness. For the republic is in deep doo-doo, as former President Bush once said, and it's going to take more than a collection of civic-minded scribes nattering about democratic renewal to save us.