I’m a person with a passion for politics and public policy debates and for the ideas that animate and color those debates, a passion I’ve pursued as a journalist, an editor, a student of politics and political theory, an analyst of public policy and in other ways. This site is intended to be a space where I can offer reflections on public debates and ideas and share information that I think can matter. I hope it will also be a place where I can get feedback and thoughts from others who share my concerns.
The title of the blog comes from Max Weber’s great essay ”Politics as a Vocation.” After explaining some of the many difficulties and compromises political practice entails, he calls politics, “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”
Like Weber, I see politics as a long, slow, difficult often tedious and compromising process. But that’s not a repudiation of idealism or of the role of ideas in public life for I want to insist, just as Weber does, that part of the lesson of politics is that “all historical experience confirms the truth — that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.”
Franz Schneiderman
