Perhaps the glass is half full

Mother Jones interviews Tony Kushner for their December issue. Kushner won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, Angels in America, which is currently showing as a two-part film on HBO. A bit of the interview that caught my attention:

There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we’ve misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn’t get it what it wanted. As a result, it’s a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.

Kushner’s comments remind me of a piece from earlier this year by Anil Dash, who asserts that the sociopolitical trend in the US has been toward the liberal. (Although I think one could make an equally convincing case that both the Democrat and the Republicans are essentially conservative…but I’ll leave that for someone else.)