David Sirota has written a wonderful new book with an expansive Theory of Our Zeitgeist: that the toxic 1980s — as well as our current culture’s funhouse-mirror view of that warped decade — are still poisoning our country. His powerful argument will be familiar to Firepups: the adulation of Ronald Reagan, along with our renewed taxcut fetish, admiration of greed, and mainstreaming of militarism have ruined any chance of restoring balance to our nation’s income inequity and spoiled our planet’s chance for peace, harmony and (possibly) survival.

I want the Greens to win. I want the Islamic Republic to lose. But I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that if and when that happy day arrives, a host of foreign-policy dilemmas automatically unlocks, or even gets set on a glide path to unlocking. Not everything good is good together, or all at once, so let’s stop treating democracy like a children’s fable or magical incantation.