My reference to Utopia isn’t about elaborating complex and technical plans for the future.  We need to be open to uncertainty and not think we know more about the future than we do.  We shouldn’t so much engineer Utopias as imagine them and then engage in practical politics with out end in sight.

When you write that “I believe… that injustice and needless suffering ANYWHERE is a threat to justice and happiness EVERYWHERE — and so we must employ our sense of empathy, and our sense of the interconnectedness of things,” you’re expressing what I consider to be a fundamentally Utopian vision.

We’ve moved far enough in our thinking that the idea that EVERYONE deserves and should work to collectively attain a decent safe secure free life doesn’t seem like ideology to us anymore, but to a southern plantation owner a hundred fifty years ago it would seem like hateful far left ideology.

The purpose of this rule is provide some positive incentive for Obama to do what we want, rather than just negative incentive. The purpose is also to avoid a situation where we are demonizing Obama — holding him responsible for failing to enact a “pure” progressive agenda.

I also want to take issue with the idea that we should frame our thinking around envisioning future utopias and then imagining how we’re going to get there. I certainly see the value of that approach, but the downside is that we will get caught up in our elaborate fantastic theories about future utopias, and forget that we face pressing challenges in the present. More than 40 million Americans don’t have health care, and all over the world poverty and disease remain a problem for us all. The threat of global warming looms larger with every passing year. Nuclear weapons still pose a threat to our safety and the safety of all people on the planet. Our global economy is in a steep decline. I believe (and I forget who I’m stealing this from) that injustice and needless suffering ANYWHERE is a threat to justice and happiness EVERYWHERE — and so we must employ our sense of empathy, and our sense of the interconnectedness of things, and recognize that others’ victimization and suffering, at home and abroad, remain a threat to our own security, as individuals and as Americans. 

Engineering utopias is fundamentally an ideological undertaking based on abstract notions of how people behave. But addressing the problems we face in the present requires a more pragmatic approach, based on the notion that greater justice and reduced suffering in the present will yeild benefits down the line.

I suppose I can embrace your way of thinking this way: In 100 years, I want to live in a world where nearly all people experience justice, and where nearly all people who suffer feel included in our global community, rather than abandoned by it.