- University students on socialism: “the increasing socialist sentiment in young people stems from a largely aesthetic basis and attraction to abstract ideologies of socialism—a picturesque utopianism” and “Young people wouldn’t be receptive to this messaging if the current system were working for us. We’re not ideologically committed to socialism. We’re desperate for someone, anyone, to take our economic anxiety seriously…” — and many other smart insights.
- From the New Yorker: ‘Isaiah Berlin famously observed that there is no social world without loss. We want and value many things that cannot be had at the same time. Say we want people to be free and also to be equal and to live in happy, unalienated communities. What if some people’s exercise of freedom renders things less equal, or less happy and more alienated? Berlin thought it a contemptible sleight of hand to insist that such freedom was not “true freedom.” To hope to honor all our values, he believed, is not simply overoptimistic but incoherent. What makes some political choices tragic is not that we have failed to think hard enough about how to have it all but that there is, in fact, no way to have it all. Politics, then, is the always unsatisfying project of managing loss; at its best, it consists of doing this without self-deception.’
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