. . . or dying, anyway.
Thus says Martin Peretz, editor of liberal think-mag The New Republic.
Among many other interesting things, he writes:
Liberals like to blame their political consultants. But then, if you depend on consultants for your motivating ideas, you are nowhere. So let’s admit it: The liberals are themselves uninspired by a vision of the good society–a problem we didn’t have 30 years ago. For several years, the liberal agenda has looked and sounded like little more than a bookkeeping exercise. We want to spend more, they less. In the end, the numbers do not clarify; they confuse. Almost no one can explain any principle behind the cost differences.
It’s much easier, more comfortable, to do the old refrains. You can easily rouse a crowd when you get it to sing, "We Shall Overcome." One of the tropes that trips off the tongues of American liberals is the civil rights theme of the ’60s. Another is that U.S. power is dangerous to others and dangerous to us. This is also a reprise from the ’60s, the late ’60s. Virtue returns, it seems, merely by mouthing the words.
For months, liberals have been peddling one disaster scenario after another, one contradictory fact somehow reinforcing another, hoping now against hope that their gloomy visions will come true.
I happen to believe that they won’t. This will not curb the liberal complaint. That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let’s hope we still have the strength.
I have in recent years come to believe that there was a time in the history of this country when to be a liberal was both sensible and even, in some cases, morally imperative. There have been real and egregious abuses of civil rights (slavery, child labor, racial inequality). But the struggle to correct the most horrendous civil rights abuse of our time (abortion) now falls almost exclusively to the conservatives. I think what many liberals fail to realize is that what gave moral authority to these great past movements was an appeal to absolute truth, which is now anathema to the left.
Though povery and inequities of race and class do persist to some extent here in the U.S., they cannot (with the exception of abortion) be compared to the great struggles of the past. Our poor would be rich in many other countries. Our remaining racial problems cannot be corrected through legislation.
The liberals are truly almost a century behind. The U.S. is (in the main) NOT THE PROBLEM!
Well, I’m glad to hear that liberalism is dead in America.
Unfortunately here in Canada it’s just the opposite.
“Unfortunately here in Canada it’s just the opposite.”
I have wondered if the steady influx of liberals over the generations since Vietnam may have influenced Canada’s political makeup. Personally, I think liberals are far more likely to bolt for greener pastures when the going gets tough. You often hear people joking about going to Canada in times of crisis like war, but you never hear of people pledging the same when a Planned Parenthood opens in their town.
Again, I think the time to send the bumper-sticker message is nigh: It’s the Abortion, Stupid.
No, it is not dead. It has just assumed the name “Bush Conservatism.”
We have record deficits. Federal programs, “no child left behind,” are viewed as the panacea for all of our problems. We have a Trotskite foreign policy. Individual freedoms are being taken/surrendered in the name of security. Just 15 or 20 years ago GWB would have been denounced as a raving leftist.
No, most conservatives don’t mind big intrusive government just so they’re in charge of that big, intrusive government.
Conventionalism “liberalism” is simply the calcified remains of the beliefs of certain radicals in the late sixties and early seventies. It actually had little to do with traditional liberalism, the New Deal, or the needs of the country or the actual Democratic constituency. Ever since its triumph post-1968 it has strangled and killed the Democratic Party by alienating its true constituency – the working and middle classes.
A lot of the problem stems from people who seem to view politics as a form of self-therapy rather than a serious busy on how to use power to solve political questions – how people organize with each other. It will be a good day when the serious people (not necessarily the professionals, those are two different sets) come back.