Word: hegelian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thing too.) It was fallen guru Dick Morris who tried to make the case that Clinton was the great postideological hedgehog, the unifier of divergent strains in American political thought. Clinton, Morris said, is "the end product of the debate between Democrats and Republicans this century." He used this Hegelian dialectic to describe Clinton as the modern ideological synthesizer of traditionally Republican ideas (balancing the budget) and Democratic nostrums (raising the minimum wage). But Clinton is not so much the synthesis as the dialectic itself, veering from a massive top-down national health plan to supporting more incremental advances like...
...finished. I had to ask myself, Is his presidency worth defending? And I decided it was. He is the end product of the debate between Democrats and Republicans in this century. By marrying the Democratic doctrine of opportunity to the Republican doctrine of responsibility, Clinton could achieve a Hegelian synthesis. And on a personal level, this was as close as I'd ever get. What do I believe? I don't believe there is a single issue where Bill Clinton and I disagree. I'm just like...
...choice. One night a week, usually Wednesday, he leads a campaign meeting at the residence that includes the President, Vice President, Sosnik, Bob Squier (the campaign media adviser brought in by Morris and Gore), Stephanopoulos and other senior aides. Ickes apparently bridles at Morris' highbrow musing about the Hegelian dialectics of campaigns...
What is missing is the synthesis, or "sinthesis" as I prefer to call it. The formula is exactly Hegelian. You do your thesis. It drives you crazy, so you avoid it with anti-thesis. Together thesis and anti-thesis explode in a giant ball of fire that, if you're lucky, leaves you with sin-thesis...
Part of the fallacy then, which Fukuyama perpetuates, was an obsessive focus on ideology. Of course ideas can be wonderful, or terrible, and potent; you don't have to be a Hegelian to know that. But Fukuyama invests abstractions -- comprehensive categories and grand postulations -- with more weight than messy reality will support. For instance, in a chart intended to show how the number of "liberal democracies" on earth has grown, he includes Singapore, where there are laws against chewing gum and failing to flush public toilets; Sri Lanka, where murderous ethnic and religious violence continues nonstop; and Colombia, where narcoterrorists...