Calling All Liberals: It's Time to Fight (Priceless Giggles Alert)

The Nation ^ | 10/20/2011 | Benjamin R. Barber

[mojito]

Liberalism’s core values remain strong, persuasive and enduring. Their fighting vitality is apparent in the spreading youth-led protests on Wall Street and across the country. What we lack is a coherent progressive narrative explaining and justifying liberalism’s role in the radically changed circumstances of the twenty-first century—a liberal vision of the kind Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams offered the founders or John Dewey gave the Progressive Era. Liberals need to stop denying who they are and, like the young protesters, start fighting for what they believe in. For though aggravated and anxious, liberals have never been less visible in the struggle for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens.

With no coherent new liberal narrative to render our values timely, we too often cleave to the center and compromise to the right. We care about civility, but civility is looking a lot like surrender. We must not step away from our values before negotiation begins, allowing runaway financial markets, bloviating plutocrats and anti-government hubris to dominate, while poverty, social justice and climate change slip off the legislative agenda. And when we do take to the streets to voice our anger, we lack the clarity and focus that only a relevant narrative can offer.

The stakes have never been higher: nearly three years after the inauguration of a moderate African-American president, our nation confronts a rapacious plutocracy reminiscent of the Gilded Age and a noisome corporate media along with a noisy, supposedly anti-plutocratic populist Tea Party that is in fact funded by that very plutocracy. This weird coalition of the smug and the frightened cries, “We’re number one!” even as it dismantles the democratic institutions and programs that make America great and plays roulette with the debt ceiling and America’s global reputation.

[Pollster1]

That third photo...tell me it is photoshopped, please. That way I’ll know whether to laugh or cry.

I don't actually know, but it's so classically liberal that I couldn't resist. [I found it on Google images by searching for OWS photos, but i suspect it was taken elsewhere and reused.]

[Talisker]

The author is certifiable.

Well, he was a certified advisor to the Clinton White House.

IMO, it doesn't get lower than that.

[NJRighty]

...nearly three years after the inauguration of a moderate African-American president...

Moderate. LOLOL

[daku]

Well done, funniest thing I’ve read on the subject

[noprogs]

Only two of those “values” really bother me, and that is the socialism/communism.

If it were not for the socialism/communism inherent in the wealth redistribution that allows these people to exist, the consequences of promiscuity, excess drug useage, laziness and even BO would be self correcting due to real consequences!

[RedMDer]

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[andy58-in-nh]

The Progressive “message” is always obscured, most often by verbal legerdemain, because it would otherwise be required to speak its name and reveal its true purpose, namely: Inability, and the purposeful justification of theft.

[LostInBayport]

Good point. These people are not independently wealthy, but the money of others (their families, SEIU, welfare, unemployment insurance, donations, etc.) allows them the luxury of this public temper tantrum for however long it lasts. Without it they would have to work at a job, any job, or starve.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks mojito.

...nearly three years after the inauguration of a moderate African-American president, our nation confronts a rapacious plutocracy reminiscent of the Gilded Age and a noisome corporate media along with a noisy, supposedly anti-plutocratic populist Tea Party that is in fact funded by that very plutocracy.

What a miserable lying c- s-er.

Zero isn't and never has been a moderate.

He's not African-American, he's a red diaper baby with African and Arab ancestry, who was born in Kenya according to his Kenyan relatives, and he has never produced anything resembling a real birth certificate. The wackjobs who claim that he has claimed the same thing about two different bogus ones, and talk about them as if only one has ever been alleged to be real.

Zero has never held a job, nor had to. He's lived off a series of rich sponsors and patrons, including foreign Moslems who are rich as Croesus.

The OWS was made up nearly entirely of paid protestors, but the trust fund bums and public welfare success stories have also joined in, along with overpaid entertainment industry rich folks and overpaid academic shills.

The hatred of Jews among the OWS is clear and obvious, and has been ignored -- not denied, not condemned, ignored.

BTW, for another instance of the pejorative use of "plutocrats", check out "The Sorrow and the Pity", which contains anti-Jewish Nazi vintage agitprop.

[Traveler59]

That third photo...tell me it is photoshopped, please. That way I’ll know whether to laugh or cry.

Not photoshopped, it was a picture taken from a TV screen.

Check http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/mlkday.asp

[Eleutheria5]

“Their fighting vitality is apparent in the spreading youth-led protests on Wall Street and across the country. “

So, the mouldy, anti-Semitic hippy wannabes of OWS, they’re “youths”? They’re also “liberals”? You heard it straight from the horse. Never let them live it down.

[Eleutheria5]

He did say something about being incoherent, though. Maybe that’s the core value.

[Rocky]

supposedly anti-plutocratic populist Tea Party that is in fact funded by that very plutocracy

What bs. This guy must live in a basement; he only writes about the world that he imagines. The real world has completely escaped his consciousness.

[Eleutheria5]

The social contract must safeguard certain inalienable rights, among them the right to subsidies, subsidies for “art,” subsidies for abortion, taking liberties on public streets, suppressing liberty on the public airwaves, and the pursuit of flash-mob victims.

[LostInBayport]

Thanks for the link...astonishing. If they would only mix up their Ds and Rs when voting.

[RhoTheta]

Maybe the message is "We are clueless and we need adult supervision".

I actually managed to suppress my gag reflex enough to read most of Page 1 of 2 before I gave up, but my take-away was exactly that! "We are clueless and we need adult supervision".

[Eleutheria5]

Only on a butterfly-shapped ballot with chads hanging out in the dimples.

[driftless2]

"silly mess"

You got that right. It's almost impossible to read this entire screed without dozing off, but I skipped down to the last paragraphs which reveal this totalitarian's mind. He writes "private ownership corrupts democracy" in one of his final statements. He wants the internet to be run by a central government. He could have spared the poor fools who read the entire ridiculous leftist jumble, and just wrote that. This guy really needs a good editor.

[driftless2]

"manifesto"

The great majority of people who write these sorts of things tend to be liberal. They fervently believe if they can just get their great ideas down on paper, the world will read them and recognize what a genius is the writer. Then supposedly money, chicks, power will ensue, and the writer will rightfully be recognized as a true hero of the people. Or at least the leftist side of spectrum.

But I would bet that if the name Benjamin Barber comes up on any good leftist's reading list in the future, they'll quickly skip it and get back to the bong. They won't read someone who's even more boring than Chomsky.

[Boiler Plate]

I think the only take away is

“while taxes are seen as bad by most everyone and we shouldn’t be for something everyone hates, they are in fact really good and we should fight for them. Oh and that liberty thingy, what ever that is, we should for that too, cause then we’re good guys”.