the original great exponent of youth politics was Niccolo Machiavelli, who was the first to celebrate the political daring and audacity of the young. Audacity is a virtue, in the Machiavellian sense.
[snip]
I’m not arguing that Barack Obama is a self-conscious Machiavellian, but he is a politician made for the world that Machiavelli has made, a world in which “we are the change we have been waiting for” makes a certain kind of sense.
Young people are supposed to love bold action, while old people sit around and talk, to the irritation of impatient youth. That's why they're always susceptible to talk of revolution and "change." Don't mend it, end it is their perpetual temptation.
The irony is, if young people were paying attention, they'd see the man of action in this campaign is John McCain, who's more young at heart than Obama and the entire left wing. The Left talks about youth: youth politics, doing it for the children, youth, youth, youthity youth youth. But it has the cynicism and despair of a very old, tired man.
What they don’t realize is that John McCain was and is also an impetuous man of action. As such, he’s at best an imperfect example of the wisdom of age to which I referred above. But he has learned a hard and ultimately very wise lesson that Barack Obama (and my students) apparently have not. He spoke about it very movingly in his acceptance speech. He knows he isn’t, and can’t do, everything alone.Indeed.
John McCain’s “we” isn’t a generation, self-consciously differentiating itself from a flawed past. It’s a country always striving to live up to its admirable principles, moved by what Abraham Lincoln once called “those mystic chords of memory, stretching from every patriot grave to every heart and hearthstone.”
You don't have to be old to be moved by that.
