This isn’t anything that most folks on the left don’t know (I don’t think, at least). But it is a smart take about what progressives have to deal with. We so often assume that everyone lives in reality, where our arguments make sense. That isn’t the case. And that’s a part of why I started this blog. To help progressives compete in that kind of atmosphere.
In 2004, an unnamed senior White House staffer, widely thought to be political adviser Karl Rove, gave a famous interview to Ron Suskind, “The aide,” Suskind wrote, “said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’”
But, the anonymous man told Suskind, that wasn’t the way the world worked. “We’re an empire now,” he’s quoted as saying, “and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
The staffer may not have known it, but he was identifying…
View original post 1,035 more words
Share this:
