Historical or hysterical perspective?

Article

Why Progressives Hate Steve Bannon’s Cyclical View Of History

Summary

A correspondent for The Federalist argues that liberals reject a cyclical understanding of history because it counters their idea of progress toward utopia.

Quote

"Progressives take it as a matter of faith that history has sides, that it is heading in a certain direction, and that it’s up to us to usher in a secular paradise. For progressives like Ashbrook, merely anticipating a crisis in the age of Trump makes a crisis more likely to happen, which might harm the progressive cause. Hence, writers like Howe are guilty of enabling people like Bannon."

Understanding

We have such a knack for creating the illusion of control. We construct cyclical patterns of history to model what we should expect in the future. We imagine spiritual-poetic values in creation as Martin Luther King Jr. articulated, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." We use books Steve Bannon reportedly likes to predict how he will act. Or, self-disclosure alert, we get up an hour early each morning to scan media sources outside our personal bubble to try to understand what the hell is going on.

This tendency of ours is useful and limited. It is vanity to over play the extent we are in charge  but as The Boss wrote, "at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe."

I want our leaders to have a fully formed worldview and act out of a thoughtfully earned philosophy. I also want them humble enough to know their worldview isn't the only viable perspective.