Ukraine: how to end up on the wrong side by mistake

A good politics means trying to do the right thing *in the moment*

Being right and doing the right thing are different things.

Being right is a matter of knowledge and therefore of the past, while doing the right thing is a matter of action and participation, being in the present and helping to shape into the future. It’s more about appropriateness; politics in other words.

There are an awful lot of things you can be knowledgeable and therefore right about. However the idea of trying the right thing assumes we are in a situation where the choices are limited. They are about acceptance or rejection; support or opposition; of whose side you’re on.

In my last post (which was free to all) I talked a bit about how I think post-liberals (for want of a better term) have been going wrong in their response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was a variation of this theme: that they appeared to be more interested in being right than doing the right thing.