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Usually, one thinks of nostalgia as the characteristic vice of the conservative. When Republicans bandy slogans like “family values,” progressives are quick to recognize the dangerous sentimentality that yearns for a status quo ante in which men were men and women were women and minorities were seldom seen and never heard—the age, as Ronald Reagan so callously put it, “back before we knew we had a race problem.” In contrast, one thinks of Utopian romanticism as the characteristic weakness of the progressive. The radical's longing for revolutionary change is seen by conservatives as the dangerously naive and quixotic yearning for human perfection in a flawed and tragic world.
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- Comments on Presidential Address
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association
Footnotes
I am grateful to Bruce Ackerman, Tony Alfieri, Mike Fischl, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Jeremy Paul, Pierre Schlag, Steve Schnably, and Jonathan Simon for helpful comments and suggestions—which I did not always listen to.
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