The Irony of the American Blogosphere

I wanted to pull this out of so as not to derail the thread below. Here's Cobb on liberals and utopianism:

...any book that makes a broad call for caution against a kind of state-sponsored rationalist utopianism, gets a thumbs up from this Conservative. That is the fundamental lesson that we keep trying to teach. But when Jonah Goldberg says so, y'all get hysterical.

Right. Because attempting to establish a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq and remake the Middle East is the height of realism. Look, you can make the case that there was bipartisan support for the Iraq War because, well, there was. But here's what you can't do: Having watched one of the greatest foreign policy overreaches in American history committed with the near-uniform support of conservative institutions, committed while conservatives controlled every major branch of government, you can't ever, in any seriousness, pretend that utopianism is somehow merely the product of a brain addled by liberalism. I find it amazing that such a charge would be made in a discussion Neibhur. Simply amazing

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2008/12/the-irony-of-the-american-blogosphere/6455/