THE COMMON GOOD VS. VARIOUS PARTICULARISMS. I was in Egypt last week (about which more later), so didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the great “common good” debate inspired by Mike Tomasky‘s magisterial piece in this month’s Prospect when it was in full flower, but a couple of the responses at the end of last week raised some interesting points that are, I think, still worth unpacking. David Brook‘s gloss on Tomasky, in particular,
while, in general, I dislike the intellectual approach in which white male “progressives” raise their stature in eachother’s eyes by denigrating the legitimate claims for autonomy, democratic participation, and freedom of groups who have historically had less access to that particular American dream, I should also say that, like Mike, I lived in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that that particular political mileau is one that is uniquely capable of inspiring responses that can read to outsiders as reactionary but are apparent, to insiders, as simple defenses of relatively benign normality. While the positive gloss on New York City is that within it people from all over America and around the world are free to pursue new ways of being and create their lives out of whole cloth, the downside to that rich ferment is that New York is full of cultural and political cul-de-sacs. People who are genuinely concerned with electoral politics and liberalism in that environment frequently find themselves tangling with the micro-obsessions of radical subcultures whose perspectives are so far outside the mainstream of anything to do with real electoral politics that it’s sometimes quite shocking.
That’s one reason I live in Washington. Indeed, the great unwritten story of D.C. liberals are how, rather than being out-of-touch insiders, they are frequently more in touch with the spirit of the rest of the country than are their compatriots in the great coastal metropoles. That’s one of the reasons they are less innovative, at least when it comes to starting new movements, but also one of the reasons they
