The political expediency of us vs them in this country has morphed into a frightening social principle. It leads to a dangerous and scary place. Im brought here from reading a book review by Michael Ignatieff, and this paragraph below really resonated with me. The antagonism of others (immigrants, gays, non-believers or believers) for political gain combined with a lack of imagination in Congress is a poison: The Danes knew long before the war that their army could not resist a German invasion. Instead of overtly criticising Hitler, the Social Democratic governments of the 1930s sought to inoculate their populations against the racist ideology next door. It was in those ominous years that the shared identity of all Danes as democratic citizens was drummed into the political culture, just in time to render most Danes deeply resistant to the Nazi claim that there existed a “Jewish problem” in Denmark. Lidegaard’s central insight is that human solidarity in crisis depended on the prior consolidation of a decent politics, on the creation of a shared political imagination.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:49:21 +0000
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