Posted on 02/17/2005 6:31:56 PM PST by pissant
Great writing from an honest liberal.
Yeah, but still clueless.
Yikes! Way to go Marty! You've come a long way from firing Michael Kelly for criticizing Al Gore. Or was it Andrew Sullivan? Anyway...nice progress and well said.
re: the Fourth Turning site . . . I'm not sure I can recommend any threads. I go over there every now and again (mainly since 9/11). In fact, for a while they had a very interesting discussion about whether or not 9/11 was the trigger for their "Crisis" phase in their four-stroke history theory. Most of those threads are infested by liberals of the Bush-Oil-Conspiracy ilk, if I recall correctly. But there was at least some degree of fairly rational discussion. I'd comment further but Comcast (my broadband provider) doesn't seem to want to resolve the domain name for the site right now.
I think Strauss and Howe might possibly have some conservative leanings, but they don't appear to participate very much over there any more.
Sounds like this liberal has a fairly firm grasp of reality, and what that reality is doing to his political party.
It wasn't so long ago (the 80's in my case) when I would have very friendly and spirited give and take with liberal democrat friends. That is now barely possible and I honestly believe that it wasn't me who's changed. People like this writer (Christopher Hitchens also comes to mind) on the left have indeed become a very rare species.
Lawrence Summers. Unfortunately his idea that challenged was a conservative idea.
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.
No, it is evidence that we want things handled where they should be handled. If a case has participants from several states it is no longer a matter to be decided by the one state with the most liberal judges but by the federal government
Still, liberals know that the right's ideologically framed--but class-motivated--retreat of the government from the economy must be resisted.
Here is the peak of his error. Liberals see classes. Conservatives only see people.
An interesting read, but the author is still being intellectually dishonest if he believes this. Liberal programs of big-government, welfare and wealth distribution are not VOLUNTARY, they are enforced by law, and as such, involve implied violence upon a section of the population - the productive section whose wealth is confiscated to pay for the program.
A second point: elsewhere, the author points out that some capitlist entities, such as Enron, have committed fraud, and then reasons from the single to the general - capitalism cannot be trusted etc so government bureaucrats should be in control. While that is a logical fallacy in itself (reasoning from the single to the general), it also raises the question, ignored by the author, "why should we trust government anymore than corporations?" Obviously, governments are capable of defrauding the population in many ways (inflation, currency devaluation, abuse of eminent domain rights, changes in the covenant between current taxation and future "entitlements", confiscation of pension rights etc).
That the author ignored these issues tells me that this is actually an example of what he decries - more shallow thinking, dressed up with a good helping of adjectives.
The great unspoken truth, which the author cannot bring himself to admit, is that liberalism/socialism is bunk.
Rush just said he's going to read excerpts from this today.
El Bumpo
In the more modern mold, there's Chomsky.
Good point. As another twisting of language... many of President Bush's major proposals are both progressive and liberal in the true senses of the words, not in their current meanings. It are the Democrats who have become conservative and reactionary.
Without delusions liberals would have no ideology whatsoever.
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.
Chomsky is no more modern. He is just as old dusty and broken...he just never got the chance to seize power.
Ward Churchill?
Nope, Churchill's not smart enough to do the "intricate academic apparatus" thing -- Churchill's a Move-On type -- he does his deed with the grace of a thug and the wit of a goon's sledge hammer.
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.
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