The great return of idealism in Western politics

Sometimes, when I see the headlines from Europe about Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party victory, and the rise of far-left and far-right parties across the continent, I begin to think that idealism is returning to Western politics — and will soon come to America, too.

I imagine the future voice of my child, grown up and opinionated like I am. I'm driving her back from college, and she turns down the news radio to let me and my generation have it. She's taken a modern world history class, and my generation, the frivolous one, is up for a real beating.

You talk about when you were young like it was a great time. Couldn't you see? In the 1990s, America had a small Gulf War with this big dumb victory parade. The Trade Center was bombed in 1993, before 9/11. Did no one think worse was coming?

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There were race riots in Los Angeles. And truly political rap sold records. But it took more than 20 years for people in your generation to say "Black Lives Matter?" I don't get it.

After the Cold War you had this moment to address injustice at home. All the signs of danger in Europe, the conflict between a new nationalism and a new socialism, were plain as day. My generation is pledging itself to great ideals about what kind of world will emerge from the present. In some places we're fighting and dying for these ideals. And you were talking about midnight basketball and the president having sex with an intern?

Your generation and grandpa's were debating small-percentage moves in the tax rate like they were life and death. That's nothing. Today, politics is about who we are as nations, about the whole structure of a modern political economy. Not five percent here or there. Gaffes? Seriously? You were failing the future. And you think it was a better time?

And I'll laugh. Oh, you had to be there, I'll say. We saw the world a lot differently. When I was growing up, and the nation's major political differences were small, we were mostly getting richer. We were growing in comfort. Crime was going down. Civic education was geared toward teaching us that the country's historic struggle to bring blacks into the fullness of American life was on the cusp of being achieved, almost inevitably so.

Everything was getting better, and so we invented the policy wonk to replace the visionary and the revolutionary. Instead of philosophies and creeds, we had people obsessed with social science data. Their job was to find out which way to tweak the nobs of government power to get results. I know that sounds so stupid now.

We were taught about World War I and the Cold War in a way that scorned the idealism of all sides. Boys singing "Over There" were shown to us as objects of pitiable mockery, not gallants, as you see them now. For us, love of nation was a way of getting conned or killed.

The Baby Boomers who were our teachers showed us videos of themselves practicing duck-and-cover during the 1950s, as if that could save them from a nuclear bomb blast. It was an absurdity. World War II was taught to us as the one good war partly because the Nazis offended against tolerance and diversity, two values that were pursued in my generation through gentle speech guidelines and street activism, not guided missiles and paramilitary campaigns.

We were safety-obsessed, too. Kids would get too fat, adopt the wrong values, hear the wrong words. We believed idealism nearly wrecked the world. And really, it did.

You see it as mere cynicism now, but we took one stab at idealism, after the 9/11 terror attacks. We would bring democracy to the Muslim world. Our president, George W. Bush, even asked American children to donate $1 to Afghan children. It was touching. That project blew up in everyone's faces. We got ISIS and a refugee crisis. Of course some of us longed for the no-stakes '90s again.

My generation's idealism was mostly channeled into private projects, which bubbled over into politics only when they had ceased being controversial. Sometimes these projects sprouted in business rather than politics. Silicon Valley was where idealists went to get rich. Idealism was kind of like brand-differentiation then. I understand brand-differentiation isn't a phrase that has meaning for you.

You see the cynicism and the smallness of our politics. You see that we treated political leaders like game show contestants, and you are disgusted. And I understand. Their lack of idealism can be correlated with bumbling failure and bloodshed. Game show contestants, it turns out, can conduct unjust wars. Cynics can sit on top of an economic system that is breaking down, where the poor are subsidized in inequitable conditions, while the political class constantly sells out their interests.

You see that powerful European nations launched economic war on less powerful ones and called it peace. You see that American leaders stoked wars in far-off places, causing needless death and destruction. And then you see that the press asked them about inanities.

I'm excited by your ideals. It's like a cold shower for the soul. But I worry that your great-grandkids will look on your generation's passions and sacrifices as misguided, too, like the passions and sacrifices of those poor Tommy Boys. I want you safe, and home. I want my MTV, and to talk about the president fooling around with an intern again. Those were good, good days. You have to believe me. There's a lot to fear in the return of idealism and high-stakes politics.