LOSING OUR DELUSIONS: Not Much Left (Despondent Liberal on state of Liberalism)

New Republic ^ | 2/17/05 | Martin Peretz

[pissant]

I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in the early 1960s, the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead. Conservatism, he said, was "bookless," a characteristic Galbraithian, which is to say Olympian, verdict. Without books, there are no ideas. And it is true: American conservatism was, at the time, a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual who, as Clinton Rossiter (himself a moderate conservative) wrote, has "begun to sound like a man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country."

At this point in history, it is liberalism upon which such judgments are rendered. And understandably so. It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. The most penetrating thinker of the old liberalism, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is virtually unknown in the circles within which he once spoke and listened, perhaps because he held a gloomy view of human nature. However gripping his illuminations, however much they may have been validated by history, liberals have no patience for such pessimism. So who has replaced Niebuhr, the once-commanding tribune to both town and gown? It's as if no one even tries to fill the vacuum. Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus. In any case, it is the apparatus that is designed to persuade, not the idea.

Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country.

Europe is also making the disenchanting journey from social democracy, but via a different route. Its elites had not foreseen that a virtually unchecked Muslim immigration might hijack the welfare state and poison the postwar culture of relative tolerance that supported its politics. To the contrary, Europe's leftist elites lulled the electorates into a false feeling of security that the new arrivals were simply doing the work that unprecedented low European birth rates were leaving undone. No social or cultural costs were to be incurred. Transaction closed. Well, it was not quite so simple. And, while the workforce still needs more workers, the economies of Europe have been dragged down by social guarantees to large families who do not always have a wage-earner in the house. So, even in the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, the assuring left-wing bromides are no longer believed.

he conflict between right and left in the United States is different. What animates American conservatism is the future of the regulatory state and the trajectory of federalism. The conservatives have not themselves agreed on how far they want to retract either regulation or the authority of the national government. These are not axiomatic questions for them, as can be seen by their determined and contravening success last week in empowering not the states against Washington but Washington against the states in the area of tort law. As Jeffrey Rosen has pointed out in these pages, many of these issues will be fought out in the courts. But not all. So a great national debate will not be avoided.

Liberals have reflexes on these matters, and these reflexes put them in a defensive posture. But they have not yet conducted an honest internal conversation that assumes from the start that the very nature of the country has changed since the great New Deal reckoning. Surely there are some matters on which the regulatory state can relax. Doubtless also there are others that can revert to the states. Still, liberals know that the right's ideologically framed--but class-motivated--retreat of the government from the economy must be resisted. There will simply be too many victims left on the side of the road.

At the same time, U.S. politics has not yet confronted a phenomenon that has been on the front page of the international financial press for years. This is the dizzying specter of economic competition from China, whose hold on U.S. Treasury bonds leaves the dollar vulnerable to a tremendous decline should China decide to sell them. (There is a new model of society emerging before our eyes: a most rapacious capitalist economy under a most pitiless communist political tyranny.) The industrialized states of Europe and, predictably, Japan are battening down their hatches rather than admitting to the challenge from China. But China will not go away.

There is also a rapacious capitalism in our own country. Of course, it is not as brutalizing as it is in China. But it is demoralizing and punishing. Moreover, it threatens its own ethical foundations. The great achievement of U.S. capitalism was that it became democratic, and the demos could place reasonable trust in its institutions. The very extent of stockholding through mutual funds, pension funds, and individual holdings is a tribute to the reliability of the market makers, the corporations themselves, and their guarantors. We now know that much of this confidence was misplaced and that some of the most estimable companies and financial institutions were cooking the books and fixing the odds for the favored. Eliot Spitzer has taught us a great lesson in our vulnerability. Many individual corporations, investment banks, stock brokerages, insurance companies, auditors, and, surely, lawyers who vetted their contracts and other arrangements were complicit in violating the public trust. What does a certification of a financial report by an accounting firm actually prove when each of the Big Four (formerly the Big Five) has been culpable of unethical behavior on several counts? What has happened on Wall Street in the last few years would be tantamount to the doctors of the great teaching hospitals in the United States deciding in secret to abjure the Hippocratic Oath. For some reason, even liberals have been loath to confront this reality of the country's corporate and financial life. Yes, it is true that greed plays a role, even a creative role, in economic progress. Still, greed need not go unbridled. What is a responsible liberal for if he doesn't take on this task?

iberals 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. But there are grand matters that need to be addressed, and the grandest one is what we owe each other as Americans. People who are voluntarily obliged to each other across classes and races, professions and ethnicities, tend to trust each other, like a patient his doctor and a student her teacher. It is not easy to limn out such a vision practically. But we have it in our bones.

In our bones or not, it is an exacting and long-time task. 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.

One of the legacies of the '60s is liberal idealism about race. But that discussion has grown particularly outmoded in the Democratic Party. African Americans and Caribbean Americans (the differences between them another largely unspoken reality) have made tremendous strides in their education, in social mobility, in employment, in housing, and in politics as images and realities in the media. Even the gap in wealth accumulation between whites and blacks has begun to narrow, and, on this, even tremendous individual achievement over one generation cannot compensate for the accumulated advantages of inherited money over two or three generations. Still, the last 30 years separate two worlds. The statistics prove it. And this, too, we know in our bones.

But, in the Democratic Party, among liberals, the usual hustlers are still cheered. Jesse Jackson is still paid off, mostly not to make trouble. The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. Early in the race, it was clear that he--like Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich--was not a serious candidate. Yet he was treated as if he just might take the oath of office at the Capitol on January 20. In the end, he won only a handful of delegates. But he was there, speaking in near-prime time to the Democratic convention. Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman.

This patronizing attitude is proof positive that, as deep as the social and economic gains have been among African Americans, many liberals prefer to maintain their own time-honored patronizing position vis-à-vis "the other," the needy. This is, frankly, in sharp contrast to President Bush, who seems not to be impeded by race difference (and gender difference) in his appointments and among his friends. Maybe it is just a generational thing, and, if it is that, it is also a good thing. But he may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias.

t is more than interesting that liberals have so much trouble recontextualizing race in the United States. It is, to move to the point, pathetic. And it leaves work undone. In Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (the Michigan affirmative action case), she wrote that the Court assumed that, in 25 years, there will no longer be a need for affirmative action. Unless things change quickly, she will be completely off the mark. Nearly two years have passed since that ruling and virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can't.

This leaves us with the issue of U.S. power, the other leftover from the '60s. It is true: American liberals no longer believe in the axiomatic virtue of revolutions and revolutionaries. But let's face it: It's hard to get a candid conversation going about Cuba with one. The heavily documented evidence of Fidel Castro's tyranny notwithstanding, he still has a vestigial cachet among us. After all, he has survived Uncle Sam's hostility for more than 45 years. And, no, the Viet Cong didn't really exist. It was at once Ho Chi Minh's pickax and bludgeon in the south. Pose this question at an Upper West Side dinner party: What was worse, Nazism or Communism? Surely, the answer will be Nazism ... because Communism had an ideal of the good. This, despite the fact that communist revolutions and communist regimes murdered ever so many more millions of innocents and transformed the yearning of many idealists for equality into the brutal assertion of evil, a boot stamping on the human face forever.

Peter Beinart has argued, also in these pages ("A Fighting Faith," December 13, 2004), the case for a vast national and international mobilization against Islamic fanaticism and Arab terrorism. It is typologically the same people who wanted the United States to let communism triumph--in postwar Italy and Greece, in mid-cold war France and late-cold war Portugal--who object to U.S. efforts right now in the Middle East. You hear the schadenfreude in their voices--you read it in their words--at our troubles in Iraq. 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.

[pissant]

Interested read from one of the more responsible Liberal publications.

[expatpat]

Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture?

Karl Marx.

[Darkwolf377]

" an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell Kirk"

Both of whom were more prominent and thoughtful than any liberal thinker of the same era.

[pissant]

And I would add Ronald Reagan to the conservative intellectual circle, even back in the 1960s. In fact he is the giant among them all.

[RBroadfoot]

Very interesting. Apparently, some liberals -- a very few -- are capable of honest self-appraisal.

Meanwhile, the majority of liberals appoint Dr. Dean head of their political party ... the guy who said, "I hate Republicans and I hate everything they stand for" ... and openly proclaim their hatred of President Bush.

At least we know which is indeed the party of hate.

[JFK_Lib]

Good article.

Why is it that al Sharpton, every bit as racist as David Duke, continues to get equal treatment in the press?

[IronJack]

Russell Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual who, as Clinton Rossiter (himself a moderate conservative) wrote, has "begun to sound like a man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country."

And yet the ideas of Russell Kirk, or more accurately, his analysis of the ideas of others compounded with his own insights, resonate today with a whole new generation of conservatives.

What's old is made new again, while the stale, obsolete ideas of the "progressive" movement are embarrassingly out of date, kind of like an over-the-hill former cheerleader who insists on wearing the clothes from her salad days. Problem is, what looked good on a supple 18-year-old in 1960 just looks silly on a sagging grandmother in 2005.

The rest of the world grew up. The Left didn't.

[blanknoone]

That is an extremely limited view. There is also Lenin. Stalin. Trotsky. Mao.

[expatpat]

Sorry, I stand corrected.

[Darkwolf377]

"This patronizing attitude is proof positive that, as deep as the social and economic gains have been among African Americans, many liberals prefer to maintain their own time-honored patronizing position vis-à-vis "the other," the needy. This is, frankly, in sharp contrast to President Bush, who seems not to be impeded by race difference (and gender difference) in his appointments and among his friends. Maybe it is just a generational thing, and, if it is that, it is also a good thing. But he may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias."

It's nice to see a liberal giving Bush credit in this area, though of course the then dives into the "we still need Affirmative Action" spiel.

I think the whole point of this article is sound but he gives no real solutions, and should not. You can't plan where a party is going to end up after everything falls apart, but I think many DU-MoveOn-Deaniacs are so sick of being losers they will be unwilling to back a Dem who will be almost as bad (to them) as Bush, and will create a new Progressive Democrat party or something--maybe even a Green party of some substance. Problem is it's going to take at least a couple decades to get anywhere electorally so that winning a presidency is going to have meaningful support in congress and the state level.

[JennysCool]

Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus.

Ward Churchill?

[Ace's Dad]

Take as just one instance Russell Kirk

I agree. I knew Dr. Kirk, and no liberal writer except, perhaps, the before mentioned Niebuhr was in his league.

[Darkwolf377]

Kirk wrote excellent short stories, too.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

How about this - liberal secular humanism is just wrong. Wrong ethically, historically, ontologically, culturally, spiritually, and psychologically. It is a war against nature, the nature of man, and God. It can never work because it goes directly against the needs and true ends of man. It creates false images and false hopes. It derails civilization from the noblest ideals and virtues of humanity. It reduces man to the level of an animal and then sets about caging him in in an artificial social engineering zoo.

[DoctorMichael]

Its getting late. Bump for later reading.

[filbert]

A Good Start.

The vibrant, rough-and-tumble but generally civil discussions here on Free Republic and elsewhere between conservatives, libertarians, etc. is a sign of the health and vigor of "the right."

An indication that the left is getting past the politics of hate and emotion would be the success of similarly robust and thoughtful sites discussing and debating the day's events from their world view.

Certainly DU ain't it.

[JennysCool]

The vast majority of the public doesn't realize that the labels "liberal" and "conservative" don't mean what they did 30 years ago. Today, it's the "liberals" who trample over freedom, in their zeal to have an ordered society where no one smokes, no one overeats, and no one says anything which might remotely offend anyone. It's the "conservatives" who'll light your smoke for you, tell an off-color joke once in awhile, and throw barbecues featuring fat hamburgers and intoxicating cocktails.

Most of the public, which doesn't pay as much attention to these things as we do, still believes the "liberals" are the free-wheeling, fun-loving bunch, rather than the stormtroopers they are at heart. We "conservatives" need to educate them. At our next barbecue.

[filbert]

Well, yes, there is that that the Left needs to get past, too. . .

[pissant]

I would love nothing more than to see the dem party split between the far left (greenies/Move-on types) and the "moderates". Their malfeasance has earned them 50 years in the wilderness.

[blanknoone]

I would actually like the opportunity to ask the author, 'what does it mean to be a 'liberal'?

My perspective is that political philosophy is rooted in the more foundational aspects of philosophy. Metaphysics and epistemology give rise to ethics and aesthetics, and ethics gives rise to group ethics/politics. The conservative movement is rooted in Judeo-Christian philosophy. The left is rooted in Kantian philosophy and its communist extensions.

My take is that the author bought all of the touchy feely propaganda designed to simultaneously mask and advance communism without ever realising what it all really meant. Now it seems he has seen his entire perspective stripped of its veneer, and he realizes that he is either a communist, which he has been telling himself for years he isn't and is an obviously failed ideology, or he is nothing. He is staring into both the mirror and the abyss at the same time.

[pissant]

well said.

[Darkwolf377]

I really believe that's in the air. The internet is fuelling the idea that these far lefties are not alone in their beliefs, that there are millions of fellow travellers out there. Before they would mope around the public library, noticing the reading copy of The Nation is always in pristine, unread shape when they went to read it. Now they think they are an untapped force of elites who just know so much better than The Masses. And it's time for them to rise up and blah blah blah.

[pissant]

You are correct. Thomas Jefferson and some of the other founders may have been the creators of enlightened liberalism (in the US anyway). But the modern liberal in no way resembles that vision; conservatives do.

[Shermy]

The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. Early in the race, it was clear that he--like Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich--was not a serious candidate.

It's a democracy. Such a snob. Reminds me of Koppel's put down of Kucinich during a debate that he wasn't a "serious" candidate. Sharpton had a special advantage - he seemed to be the only coherent one.

[Darkwolf377]

"Certainly DU ain't it."

Is DU the #1 liberal posting site? Are there any FR-like sites for the left that are a little more normal? (Or dare I say, moderate/conservative democrat?)

If anyone knows of any you can FReepmail me with the sites so we don't give them publicity. :P

[pissant]

I'd take Sharpton over Kerry as President any day of the week. That says boatloads about my regard for the Quisling from Mass.

[filbert]

I think that was really my point. As far as I know, there isn't a real Leftist alternative to FR. About the only site I know about that has halfway reasonable leftie discussions is Strauss & Howe's fourthturning.com. Even that is only palatable in small doses.

[brbethke]

Wow, how did *that* get published in New Republic?

[pissant]

The author is the poobah editor, that's how.

[JasonC]

False as a matter of intellectual history about the 60s and the New Deal era. The left did not have better ideas then. They had already lost the real intellectual debate, at the peaks of the culture. They just didn't know it yet, and the shallow pseudo intellectuals among them, who only believe ideas they are told to believe in and cannot examine real arguments on two sides of a question and tell who actually has the truth on their side, continued to believe they were enlightened and the right stupid because that is what they wanted to believe. Socialism was refuted by 1922, by Mises. The bright lights on the left saw as much at the latest by the end of WW II - Orwell, Koestler, Arendt. Hayek had already written "Road" by then. The classical liberals had seen that they had to side with the old conservatives.

When the left saw the same thing, they took the plunge into irrationalism - the old holdout of the European far right - deliberately. Worshipping foreign tyrants as "authentic", getting hot and bothered for Nietzche and his later French publicists, identity politics, the worship of youth rather than learning, slumming and waht Arendt called the "backstairs literature" of conspiracy - all of them were tropes of the irrationalist European far right when they had no reasonable arguments left. The left went for them the instant the old anti-communist wing of the party imploded.

The new left never had ideas on its side. It had sophistry and rhetoric and attitude. All of it borrowed from failed European radicalism of an earlier generation. Orwell, Koestler, and Arendt despised that radicalism, looked on it as a disease, a flight from reality. The new left was never about anything else. The cultural heights lost, they decided to fight on in the sewers.

For a while that gave them a certain catchet, it let them take over university departments in the humanities and social sciences for instance. But they took them over as a wrecking crew, not as thinkers. As soon as that was done, there was nothing to attract the young to the same old sophistry, so clearly empty and tired. Denouncing the patriarchy doesn't go very far with a young woman who has never met her father. Assailing privilege from positions of tenured comfort isn't very convincing, and radical relativist skepticism says nothing to young people who have literally never even encountered the belief in objective truth.

What are the great wits of the left up to these days? Recycled conspiracy crap, apologies for the most inhuman tyrants, antisemitism, thought police, a veneer of nature worship over crass self indulgence, partisanship without bounds, party directed hatred - look closely. That's Weimar. And not the Weimar of the left.

[pissant]

Well put.

[Wolfhound777]

"I'd take Sharpton over Kerry as President any day of the week. That says boatloads about my regard for the Quisling from Mass."

I agree. Kerry is a liar and a traitor who has gotten away with his crime. The man is not fit to run a local PTA meeting much less be a Senator, and certainly he is not fit to be the President.

[pissant]

You related to Darkwolf377?

[tet68]

. 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.

That would be the 45 million killed by liberal abortion.

FORTY FIVE MILLION!

Poor democrats, that would have been almost enough to
win the last election. Almost.

[Shisan]

Yikes. For a multi-millionaire stock broker Peretz sounds like Arthur Miller at his most humorless and despondent. His Death of a Salesman shtick is getting funnier. Prior to the election in Nov. he wrote how much he disliked and saw through that phony Kerry but his rag, of which he is publisher, supported Kerry editorially. The whole bunch at the New Republic are just a bunch of incestuous, disappointed old lefties wondering what went wrong and why everybody ain't as smart as they. Occasionally they leave NYC to visit Europe but have no idea what the US is really about.

[Uncle Miltie]

Clearly liberalism has no lack of words.

Just ideas.

[Shermy]

Bump.

[pissant]

And why isn't he offering up his own vision of where his beloved party needs to go? Tough to travel the road when you do not have a destination. The socialism and communism they admired has failed, so there is no longer a rudder to steer the party. Their boat just drifts in smaller and smaller circles.

[okie01]

Is Marty Peretz the last sane liberal alive, ping.

[okie01]

Wow, how did *that* get published in New Republic?

Marty Peretz owns The New Republic.

He can say what he wants...

[Wolfhound777]

No :)

[Shisan]

Agreed.
1.A friend of my wife gave her a subscription to the New Republic and I felt it a duty to skim through it weekly rather than toss it in the can. Sheer torture. What came through was their inchoate longing for a return to the first days of the revolution where they could set things right and everybody would be singing from the same proletarian song book. Oh, if Trotsky were still here they cry.
2.A few weeks ago Peter Beinart(the Editor) tried to outline a plan for the party (Democrat not SWP) but as Limbaugh says they cannot really say what they are or what they are for. It is the perfect neurosis. They know they are evil and dare not admit it, even to themselves.

[dirtboy]

Dang. He meandered for awhile, but then focused clearly at the end:

Pose this question at an Upper West Side dinner party: What was worse, Nazism or Communism? Surely, the answer will be Nazism ... because Communism had an ideal of the good. This, despite the fact that communist revolutions and communist regimes murdered ever so many more millions of innocents and transformed the yearning of many idealists for equality into the brutal assertion of evil, a boot stamping on the human face forever.

Ain't too many liberals who will admit that.

Peter Beinart has argued, also in these pages ("A Fighting Faith," December 13, 2004), the case for a vast national and international mobilization against Islamic fanaticism and Arab terrorism. It is typologically the same people who wanted the United States to let communism triumph--in postwar Italy and Greece, in mid-cold war France and late-cold war Portugal--who object to U.S. efforts right now in the Middle East. You hear the schadenfreude in their voices--you read it in their words--at our troubles in Iraq. 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.

Or that.

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.

Good Lord, the man is a heretic.

Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength.

I would hope so too. We could use some honest liberals. But as my newspaper friend told me, the cure for the Vietnam liberalism that infests the Dems is nothing short of death. They are not going to change. Which means the Dems still have several decades left of roaming in the wilderness, until they are gone.

Thanks for the ping.

[MNnice]

Still, liberals know that the right's ideologically framed--but class-motivated--retreat of the government from the economy must be resisted. There will simply be too many victims left on the side of the road.

This is the heart of liberalism.  Their undying belief that people are generally too stupid to take care of themselves, and that collectivism is the natural order of things.  I remember watching a Bill Clinton speech a few years ago and he lamented that the republicans were going to leave people to "fend for themselves."  I yelled at the TV, "Some people call that freedom, you moron!"

I find it amazing that the left today is struggling to find their core belief system, their message.  If they are so opposed to conservatism, which stands for the private property rights and the power of the free market, which requires less taxation, less regulation and less litigation, then surely it should be obvious to them that they are for the opposite ... MORE taxation, MORE regulation, and MORE litigation and less private property rights.  But they can't face that fact because they know it's an electoral loser.  So they have to find a different message that will enable them to regain power without having to tell the voters who they are.

 

 

[scottywr]

The fact is that even after 35 to 40 years of liberal bombardment in the media and academia, the conservative base of the US has not been defeated. Ultra-liberaliam will come and go and the natural conservatism set fourth by our founders will win the day.

[okie01]

It's nice to see a liberal giving Bush credit in this area, though of course the then dives into the "we still need Affirmative Action" spiel.

I don't believe he's saying "we still need Affirmative Action". Instead, he's saying "we need better public education".

Nearly two years have passed since that ruling and virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can't.

I believe we conservatives would agree with Peretz in every regard. In fact, he's giving us credit for having the ideas. And attacking liberals, sotto voce, for their slavish obeisance to the teachers' unions and urban 'special interests'.

[sweetliberty]

"It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying."

I appreciate his optimism.

"People who are voluntarily obliged to each other across classes and races, professions and ethnicities, tend to trust each other"

Voluntarily being the operative word here.

"That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind."

Bears repeating.

[Darkwolf377]

I disagree. He's merely describing the problem in the most general of terms, not agreeing with conservative solutions. The "different" teaching is the most flexible term in such discussions, ones left and right use for their own particular ideas about what constitutes "revamping" the system.

He's merely saying conservatives have ideas, not that he agrees with them...or he'd have SAID that.

[dirtboy]

Nearly two years have passed since that ruling and virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning.

This is the great divide between modern liberals and classical liberals, because, IMO, the current labels of conservative and liberal do not apply here, given the recent fondness of the GOP for large-scale federal educational initiatives. The modern liberal sees this divide as something you can throw laws and money at to change. The classical liberal realizes that most of the problem is cultural - and that just ain't a black problem, it's a big problem with white kids as well (I know, I used to be one). The youth peer culture disparages kids who try to achieve - except for Asians, where the kids do the opposite. And gee golly whiz, guess who is kicking fanny in the educational arena?

So how do you address that issue if you are a modern liberal? Well, you spend more tax dollars and mandate tests to determine ... that Asian kids are still kicking fanny.

Changing attitudes is the hardest thing for a government to do. And with the no-fault mentality of modern liberalism, it becomes impossible to even try, because you are then making a judgement on the relative merits of cultures. And that's a big no-no. Which is something the author didn't even touch upon.

[Athwart]

Wow, a thoughtful liberal. Look quick. They're almost extinct.