Professor Alan Wolfe was recently on Mike Barnacle’s radio program here in Boston. He teaches political science at Boston College and has a resume as long as your and my arm (try Googling him). He was drumming up interest for his latest book, Does American Democracy Still Work? New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, and was spouting many of the predictable liberal talking points. But my ears pricked up when he said that we were living in the age of cynicism … a thought with which I totally agree. He then went on to say that politicians (implying, I think, the Bush crowd because he had just been scouring Karl Rove) want us to be cynical because it freezes the political discourse and consequentially allows them to do whatever they want.
I got to thinking about this pronouncement and quickly realized – what could be more cynical than such an aphorism? He clearly (and, I think, unintentionally) proved his first point.
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