Maybe all Elizabeth Warren really is doing is setting us up for the big hug to come.
Via Facebook, I got this affirmation of my post below on the strange lack of economic content in Warren’s tenets of progressivism by the astute Professor John Moser of Ashland University:
I think Pal Law [that’s my Facebook name] is right about this–as a progressive manifesto, it’s pretty small beer. I also think that’s the point. There’s nothing on Warren’s list that Hillary Clinton couldn’t safely get behind without alienating important corporate constituents (see also on this Warren’s refusal to oppose the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank). We’re being set up for a grand “reconciliation” in which Clinton pledges to fight for all eleven of Warren’s commandments, and the two women warmly embrace on stage.
John is surely right that we’re likely to see and be moved by these smart and ambitious women embracing.
I think there’s more to it than that, of course. The longing for social justice through a big-government national community just isn’t animating Americans these days, even or especially our young sophisticates (there was a time — captured forever in Plato’s Republic – when the young erred on the side of political idealism). That’s why Democrats (even or especially Warren!) talk less about the outrages of the disappearing middle class, oligarchic creep, and the global competitive marketplace leveling our safety nets and more about the outrage of Hobby Lobby.