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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Arianna Huffington
What the country needs right now is a good hedgehog.
Back in 1953, British philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously laid out two opposing styles of leadership -- hedgehogs and foxes -- taking his cue from a line in an ancient Greek poem by Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
According to Berlin, the fox will "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way." In contrast, the hedgehog offers an "unchanging, all embracing . . . unitary inner vision."
Right now, with the country in crisis mode, the American people are longing for a hedgehog at the helm -- even a fanatical, delusional hedgehog like those currently leading the
We know that President Obama can be a hedgehog -- after all, that's how he won in 2008. But since taking office, he's largely governed as a fox. There is a world of difference between having a vision and adopting the other side's vision and trying to mitigate the damage from it. What's needed isn't a foxlike plan to lessen the damage from the Republicans' destructive economic vision. What's needed is an alternate vision.
And though it obviously would have been better to have offered an alternate vision before this preventable economic misery was allowed to spread so far, it's never too late. And it appears that there are those in the
As Binyamin Appelbaum and Helene Cooper report in The
Sadly, the foxes in the
This is a profound misreading of the country's mood. "Playing it safe is not going to cut it," said Christina Romer, Obama's former head of the
People aren't gravitating toward the
At the same time the
Reinforcing the idea that this is a time for boldness and not small fixes is the fact that discontent with economic austerity is worldwide. "From Athens to Barcelona, European town squares are being taken over by young people railing against unemployment and the injustice of yawning income gaps," wrote The Times' Tom Friedman, "while the angry tea party emerges from nowhere and sets American politics on its head."
Friedman summarizes what these young people want with one of the slogans from the recent protests in Israel: "We are fighting for an accessible future." A future that, as he notes, is increasingly "out of their grasp."
Though there are, of course, many factors that led to the riots in the U.K., the closing off of that future is certainly one of them. David Goodhart, founder of
In other words, when the future is not accessible -- when you can't find a job, can't pay your bills, can't take on the responsibilities of adult life -- you are more likely to feel that you have no stake in society and turn against it.
In times of deep crisis like our own, it's very hard for foxes to prevail over hedgehogs -- even dangerously wrong-headed ones. But right now there are no other hedgehogs in the picture.
AMERICAN POLITICS
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