Tom Wolfe was once asked, what is the most important change of your lifetime? He is purported to have answered: “Oh, that’s easy. Co-ed dorms.”That’s from the introduction to David Brooks’s new blog. If I was going to write a similar paragraph, I’d say we spend too much time debating political events and the choices leaders make and not enough time debating the structure of political institutions and the impersonal economic and systemic forces that drive the choices leaders make. In Britain, it would be absurd for a political party to win two decisive elections in a row but be completely unable to deliver on a host of campaign promises, but in America, it’s utterly unremarkable. “It’s the institutions, stupid,” is the right way to understand most of what happens in American politics, but it’s not the way people want to understand American politics, so it’s often ignored.
My own gloss on that answer is that we spend a lot of our time debating political events and the choices leaders make. But the most important changes are the shifts in culture, ideas and mentalities that people usually don’t even notice until after the fact. In 1960, it would have been absurd for most colleges to have co-ed dorms. A short time later, they were unremarkable.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Great observation from Ezra Klein
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