No More High Hopes

William Murchison in Chronicles:

"The polls" have it that Americans in 2014 expect virtually nothing from the 2014 style in Washington politicians. 

Amid the horrors we trip over every morning when evacuating our beds, this revelation may count as very, very, very good news. 

We don't want to expect much from our politicians, of whatever sex, party, creed, and persuasion. A major roadblock to achievement of the earnest hopes of the past half dozen years—the Obama years—is ... well, those same earnest hopes. My brothers, my sisters, it wasn't ever going to happen that a smooth-tongued office seeker was going to set America right—or whatever it was we supposed he would do, once duly inducted as orator-in-chief. 

Aristotle may have thought politics a worthy tool for inculcating virtue, etc., but that was another place, another time, a world of more limited aspirations than the generalized hope for life without pain, inconvenience and undue suffering, marked by ethnic reconciliation, enduring peace and steady increases in the minimum wage.

More  here.