Friday, January 28, 2005

The Principles Project

One of my best and oldest friends, Rob Arena, has been involved in a new venture called The Principles Project. The idea is to create a coherent, forward-looking liberalism.

It's an important project, since much of today's liberalism has gone off the rails. A vigorous, intelligent liberalism--think Peter Beinart, not Michael Moore--is essential to the American experiment and I wish Rob and his associates all the best. It'll be interesting to watch in the coming weeks and see what they come up with.

5 comments:

Bizarro Jack said...

It's a shame that coherency and forward-looking-ness ahve been ignored by the opposition, or we might not need to take these sorts of measures to practice being coherent and forward-looking. It would be nice if we could expect participants in debate to say "pardon me but that is not coherent or forward looking," or even "you may be coherent and forward-looking, but I just don't care what you have to say because we have a narrow majority right now and we're ignoring you" rather than just having them push play on their recording of "the message". When you're talking to a brick wall, who cares what you say?

Anonymous said...

It doesn't take much to think about. If you don't have principals, if you don't even know what they mean... you have to change who you are, period. Doesn't the entire notion of finding or reinventing yourself speak the bottom line?

The main motivation driving the Democratic party is hate. Not only a hate for conservative values, but very specific hate for Bush and Christians. An immediate example: we are in Iraq now and the consequences of pulling out would be horrific for the overwhelming majority of innocent Iraqis, but... this is the exactly what Dems want. You've lost your soul. There is truly no sense of humanity. Only a hate toward Bush and not wanting his policy here to succeed.

This project will amount to everything else: pure words - nothing but image. A hollow bible with a false sense of meaning. Your underlying intent will remain any means possible for your end result.

Steve

M. Simon said...

The Dems are going to have to figure out how to integrate the insights of DeSoto into their program.

If you are not familiar with DeSoto's work you can read a review here.BTW Bush's "ownership society" proves that he has either read DeSoto or gets it intuitively.

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Bizarro Jack said...

Steve, please go back and find out who said these things you allude to, and go argue with those people. You've tried to sum me up as the worst combination of every liberal idea you've ever heard of without addressing one other idea that was previously here in this post.

Anonymous said...

Jack you need to cool off. I wasn't directing anything specifically towards you. You've got a rather edgy complex there denying "the worst combination of every liberal idea." But... since you've involved yourself in my thoughts... it is a bit ironic a search for those elusive "principles" immediately points a finger of blame :) 'Those brick-wall conservatives made me lose my soul' LOL!