by John Nichols
“What’s your proposal? To build the just city?” asked W.H. Auden.
“I will,” the poet answered. “I agree.”
But it is not just for poets to make this agreement.
Nations must do the same, not once but constantly.
The evolution of the nation-state demands neither security nor prosperity but evolution – since security and prosperity are impossible in the absence of progress.
Most of the rest of the developed and developing world embraces the search for new ideas about how nations can change to make life better for their citizens. It is a natural and necessaryimpulse. Yet, in the United States, a country that once defined this progressive inclination, the last several decades – particularly as they have been defined by a uniquely dispiriting family from Texas – have seen a great nation searching for someone to blame for its malaise.
Peggy Wireman doesn’t play the blame game.
A politically-savvy yet relentlessly optimistic public intellectual, she keeps imploring us to look beyond a failed status quo to the future that might yet be. In this sense, she carries forward an American tradition of faith in facts rather than fantasy as the solid grounding on which a great nation might be made. No neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism for Wireman; in fact, there’s not a “neo” bone in her body. She does not ask us to make a leap of faith. She asks us to look at the reality around us – a reality defined by deindustrialization that eliminates family-supporting blue-collar jobs at a staggering rate, outsourcing that will ultimately eliminate white-collar jobs at an even more staggering rate, and policies that perpetuate both these trends - and she tells us this makes no sense. She looks at politicians who tell us we should worry more about some ill-defined conception of “morality” and tells us to start paying a whole lot more attention to the real immorality of poverty amidst plenty, families that lack the resources and time to care for one another and communities that are atomizing rather than coming together.
And then Wireman says, it’s time to connect the dots.
Like the Wisconsin Progressives of the Robert M. La Follette era, like the New Dealers of Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days, like the reformers of the 1960s who spoke of ending poverty in the foreseeable future, Wireman says the proper response to great challenges – and, make no mistake, America faces many great challenges today, as this book ably illustrates – is not despair.
The proper response is to get engaged, to get active, to recognize that the future will be as good as we make it. And with Connect the Dots, Peggy Wireman has shows us that we can, indeed, make it good.
Or, to be more precise, we must make it good.
JOHN NICHOLS
May, 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Transaction Publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
