here's the basic problem with...all political positions, more or less. let's say that you have some really good ideas about how the future should be. and let's leave out of consideration your fallibility, and just stipulate that these are, really, good ideas. it's a further assertion, and does not follow trivially, that you should seize and wield political power sufficient to realize these goals. and whether the idea with all the mechanisms needed to enforce it is still a good idea is an open question. education is good and important, and is basically to be articulated in a no child left behind kind of way. this is wrong. but say it was obviously right. now would it follow that you should not allow high school dropouts to drive? or that you should triple taxes and invest them in schools? or that you should remove truants from their families? well, no. not at all: a thousand other considerations, policies, values, budgets are engaged.

now partly this is a matter of figuring out what the priorities are among competing agendas, or the effectiveness or cost/benefit or unforeseen consequences, of a particular policy. but it also raises  fundamental matters of value: to what extent does implementing this idea compromise freedom or whatever else you might value? what does it imply about power relations in the culture? if you thought that essentially no policy passes this test - that the power required to implement an idea was never sufficiently justified by the outcome, then you'd be an anarchist. for example, since every implementation of every policy legitimates power inequalities and expands them, you might think no political program could be justified.

but it's also a basic problem within mainstream politics: you just nod along going: health care, energy independence, environment, education. but what resources are necessary and to what extent are these in competition? and what powers are you consituting and what might be done with them in...the palin administration?

Comments

[Ben]

Does a political position necessarily have to be based on an idea of how the future should be...? Surely this reduces all political stances to the 'ends' side of the means vs ends debate...?

To take just one example out of many - Walter Benjamin offers a view of politics which refuses to look forward:

"There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet."

Or to go back to Marx:

'Communism is not an ideal, we call communism the real movement which abolishes the current state of things.'

I'm not necessarily advocating either of these viewpoints, but in spite of the religious overtones to both of them, I think they are both clearly articulated political orientations, that don't posit a vision of the future...?

Maybe I'm misinterpretting your post as more comprehensive than you meant it to be? I've just picked two examples of dynamic political orientations, perhaps you were only attacking static political positions?