Winston Churchill famously said that...

..."If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

In my case, I was a conservative (or at least a free-market libertarian) at age 25. And now at age 51, I find myself getting more and more liberal. So what does that mean? I had no heart at age 25 and have no brain now? I wonder. (After a little research, I found out that Churchill may or may not have ever said this. Whatever; it's still a good quote.) But if Lord Winston never actually uttered those words, then I shouldn't feel so bad about editing them. And my edited version would go something like this: "If you're not idealistic when you're 25, you have no ambition. And if you're not realistic by the time you're 50, well then...you're just not realistic." Not as catchy, of course, but maybe more accurate--at least for me.

What got me thinking about all this was David Brooks's column in the New York Times this morning. It's about health care (of course) and essentially talks about the choice between the Baucus bill and no bill at all. The best part of it is:

At this point people like me could throw up our hands and oppose everything. But that’s not what adulthood is about. In the real world, you often don’t get to choose what your options will be. You have to choose from a few bad options. The real health care choice now is between the status quo and the bill primarily authored by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, that is emerging from the Senate Finance Committee.

The key here is that in the real world, you have to deal in real-world solutions, not fantasy-world ones. And in the real world, any solution to the health care crisis must acknowledge the constraints we are all working under. And one of the greatest of these is the private insurance lobby. They are among the most powerful and entrenched players in the current system (and the largest contributor in Washington right now). That's why President Obama (and Max Baucus) wouldn't even bother proposing a single-payer system; it would be a non-starter. And that's also why Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin couldn't get his market-based reform bill anywhere even in the old GOP-controlled Congress. The insurance companies have billions of dollars at stake and will do just about anything to protect their franchise (witness the town halls of August). That's why it should come as no surprise that the public option was voted down in the Finance Committee bill, despite polls showing overwhelming public support for it. What should be surprising is that it is still being talked about at all. And that's a testament to how much it is truly needed. So given this reality, maybe a version of the Baucus bill may be the best we can achieve right now. Besides, it can always be built on later.

And this brings me back to my version of Churchill's famous quote. When I was young, I was idealistic. I started out as a Goldwater Republican, reading The Conscience of a Conservative in high school. I later discovered Ayn Rand and became a classic free-market libertarian. And I really thought it was possible to change the world. When you're young, time seems to stretch out infinitely. Just look at what happened to the Soviet Union! But the overthrow of Communism in Russia took 70 years--and I don't have 70 years. (Even then, it appears to be experiencing some serious backsliding. In fact, the Russia of today more closely resembles the Russia of the Czars than it does the U. S. of our Founding Fathers.) Maybe this world-changing stuff is harder than it looks.

When I turned 50 or so, time began to seem less infinite. Suddenly all of the changes I could foresee at age 25 seemed less and less likely. And the phrase "politics is the art of the possible" sounded more like wisdom than a cop-out. Instead of becoming more "liberal," maybe I've just become more "realistic." We'll probably never have a libertarian society, certainly not in my lifetime. (And maybe that's not such a bad thing anyway.) So maybe it's more realistic to just acknowledge that societies evolve haphazardly and focus more on solving problems rather than waiting for some revolution that will never come.