Perfection is the Enemy

Perfection is the enemy of the good. The quote is often attributed to the French writer Gustave Flaubert, and it makes sense. A reading of Madame Bovary reveals a masterful obsession with pristine wordcraft in this story about bourgeois infidelity.

The larger idea at play is simply that an fixation with purity will lead to an inability to accept practical compromise. Radical ideologues transform this principle to an advantage: By flinging the merde of hypocrisy at every imperfection, they can achieve an advanced state of radicalism.

You know the drill: Jefferson owned and consorted with slaves. Rooselevelt okayed the Japanese camps. And even the beloved Dr. Suess drew racist pictures. By this method, those on the 'other side' become the most vile demons, and even sympathetic Democrats are stooges. Maximum critical advantage is only rewarded to those who have the stomach to engage in friendly fire.

This is the same dogma that, in some circles, makes vegans better than vegetarians and raw foodists better than the above. Without any oppressive religious structures (of course), a behavioralist ethic becomes necessary, in which most people become 'sinners' - but against Man instead of God, in the form of compromise.

Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com runs puts a neat libertarian twist on this concept. A self-described conservative (the same word trickery makes Paul Wolfowitz a progressive) Raimondo has all of the chops - he links heavily to the self-referential disinfosphere, proposes no solutions, and is willing to eat his own. It's a worthy example of polemics at their finest.