As our token idealist, I would like to draw your attention to a nice editorial in Saturday’s New York Times by Susan Neiman. She talks about a very old and heavily discussed trans-Atlantic divide. She describes old Europe’s world-weariness and how it has caused resistance to Obama’s superstar, savior image. Europeans are uncomfortable with Obama’s apparent blind optimism.
Midway through the piece Neiman makes a distinction between optimism and idealism. She defines the distinction at the end: optimists refuse to acknowledge reality; idealists remind us that it isn’t fixed. Neiman argues that Obama’s speech was not mere optimism but instead, “he was using the past to remind us all that we need not resign ourselves to the way things are now.” What makes America great, according to Obama, is our loyalty is less tied to the tribes of our birth. Instead, it is tied to a particular idea: we are not bound to our allotted station in the natural ordering. We are the true authors of our own lives.
At the end of the piece Neiman hopes that Europeans will see the difference between optimism and the American idealism Obama has come to embody. This idealism reminded me of the idealism of two great Europeans of the past. In his review of Democracy in America John Stuart Mill writes,
By Democracy, M. de Tocqueville does not, in general, mean any particular form of government. He can conceive a Democracy under an absolute monarch…. By democracy M. de Tocqueville understands equality of conditions, the absence of all aristocracy, whether constituted by political privileges, or by superiority in individual importance and social power. It is towards Democracy in this sense, towards equality between man and man, that he conceives society to be irresistibly traveling.
