Because twenty years from now, we're going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama."
Aside from the insipidness of the content of Marche's comments, the objection I have is to the use of the words "twenty years from now." This is becoming a common rhetorical device, evoking the authority of history to stamp one's opinion with some sort of unassailable imprimatur. Other ways of putting it include: "history will show," or "future generations will recognize," etc. And it's time to bring it to an end. It resembles the logical fallacy of appeal to authority where the truth of a point is proven by simply pointing out that a higher authority has pronounced it true. For example, global warming exists because the United Nations panel says it exists.
Obviously it's not true that Stephen Marche knows what people will think twenty years from now. No one does. So why does he use this rhetorical phrase? To invest his lame argument, really a non-argument, with a phony and cheap authority which it doesn't possess if left all by itself.
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