Posted on 05/07/2012 7:06:34 PM PDT by neverdem
Over the past six months the public has watched the current liberal intellectual movement crumble as its leaders have failed to provide a tenable solution to the serious problems facing our nation. President Obama is desperately searching for a way to convince the public he should be reelected. But his liberal ideology is no longer capable of providing effective answers to the questions of the 21st century. Today's liberalism has been reduced to an opposition movement, rather than a coherent ideological alternative to conservatism. The Democratic Party all but confirmed this notion with their latest slogan for the 2012 campaign: "Not A Republican."
When President Obama and the Democrats used the largest majority in over three decades to pass Obamacare -- despite the objections of the country -- they did so because they believed that it offered a significant solution to a problem. Though it remains unpopular with a majority of citizens, at least Obamacare was introduced as a bill, debated publicly, and signed into law. However, after being rejected by the people in 2010, modern liberalism has ceased to be a serious intellectual movement, trading gimmicks and demagoguery for substantial policy initiatives...
--snip--
The White House sparked a month-long, superficial debate over the Republican "War on Women" in order to distract Americans from the stunning realization that President Obama is the first president in American history to have two budgets rejected unanimously by his own party in Congress. Furthermore, Democrats have controlled the Senate for nearly six years. Yet, under Harry Reid's leadership, they have proposed a budget only once since the inauguration of President Obama and no longer even attempt to seriously negotiate a budget with Republicans. The entire discussion about the "War on Women" substantiates that modern liberalism offers no intellectual foundation for governing the United States...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Romney liberalism will pickup the mantle.
Well, don’t look now, but both major parties may be nominating liberals this year.
The intellectual content of liberalism has always been grossly overrated, and Obama lowers the bar even further.
Just like it has for the past 100 years?
Whoda thunk-it?
It couldn’t be at an end, because it never got started as an intellectual movement. Thanks neverdem.
Today's liberalism has been reduced to an opposition movement...today's liberal movement offers no direction, just resistance.
We have been pointing this out on FR for some time now. The reason is that an opposition movement is its origin - this dates back to the liberal Golden Age of the mid-60's - and the source of its romance. The self-image of the average contemporary progressive - "liberal" is a term not quite evocative enough and hence has been discarded - is one of a feisty revolutionary Fighting The Power. That doesn't work very well when they're actually in power themselves because they have to take responsibility for their actions and the results, not pant after fantasies that never were because their opponents were so repressive. Do you know why we haven't had a budget during the three years of the lamentably incompetent 0bama administration? That's why. Because if we had, they'd have to own it and the prospect frightens the hell out of them.
However, the author may be a bit optimistic in declaring the whole thing passe. It isn't, exactly. One of the enduring qualities of a progressive is his insistence that the only reasons his idiot schemes didn't achieve the desired results is repression by the Other Side and that they didn't go far enough. Reality has no bearing here. That isn't changing, which is why we hear ostensibly intelligent people still regurgitating the same, old, tired Marxian nostrums that have always failed, that have always caused poverty, cultural sterility, and police-state ossification, that have managed to accomplish absolutely nothing except to look good under the right sort of sympathetic light if the observer is willing to squint hard enough. This stuff persists because of the eternal attractions of envy, acquisitiveness, and a desire for a moral sanction for violence and theft. Yes, the movement is intellectually bankrupt, but it is emotionally pervasive among the weak, the incompetent, and the evil.
There is nothing intellectual about the philosophy of socialism. It’s a mental path of least resistance that appeals to the intellectually challenged.
Obama’s Presidency is so awful, it sometimes makes Jimmy Carter look good. It’s just unfortunate that Republicans will nominate such an uninspiring candidate.
A good place for liberals (and others) to start is by understanding that printing money cannot print wealth. Similarly, we cannot borrow ourselves into prosperity. We cannot make poor people rich by making rich people poor.
Moreover, when we destroy property rights, either head on by seizure, or less directly by taxing or inflating, we not only divert assets from private use to government use where they cannot be used as efficiently, but we also destroy price information that everyone needs to calibrate their own expectations.
When people cannot know what things should cost, they can’t know how much they can sell their work product for. When people cannot know if they are making a real profit (economic output greater than economic inputs), they end up consuming their finite capital. When economic capital is consumed there is no more, irrespective of the number of dollars the government has printed.
Without profits, there is nothing left over after expenses and with out profits they cannot be any real savings. Without savings there cannot be any new investment (no matter how much money government prints). Without new investment, there cannot be any new business expansion. And so on to the same type of prosperity that existed in the Soviet Union the day prior to its dissolution.
correction -
one liberal (Large C) Communist
one liberal (small c) conservative
Nothing about Obama was intellectual.
Just recall his trash talking of wealthy Republicans “suckin’ on a slurpee” and “driving a car into a ditch and wanting the keys”.
His handlers boast of his swagga and the way he can slow jam the news.
He’s a douchebag, not an intellectual. Hanging around with a loony like Clooney sinches it.
I agree liberalism as a meaningful provider of for-real societal “solutions” is dead—but it’s been dead for DECADES. In fact, I’m not sure it’s ever been alive.
But mythic liberalism is easily EXPLOITED as one of many tools by the neo-communist movement. And liberalism coalesces a broad cache of idiots useful to the elitist communist set—the enviros, gays, feminists, trade unionists, plaintiffs lawyers, academics, media, the celebrity culture and sundry other nose-ring wearing dysfunctional whackadoodles. These are the armies of the night, doncha know.
And empty liberal ARGUMENTS are invaluable to the likes of Ayers, Dohrn, Axelrod, Soros and the others running the CP USA movement today. Of course, these makers of the movement understand that all the red flag liberal “issues” are stupid. They are in this not to SOLVE any of society’s problems, they are in it for the same reason Lenin launched the revolt in 1917 and the geriatric Gang of Eight tried to stage one last red coup in Moscow in 1991—power and privilege.
Wait a sec... when was Obama liberalism ever an “intellectual movement”??
Great post! Spot on.
The article points up one difficulty with American Liberalism - its childishness. All the answers we needed with respect to “Obama’s Liberalism” were answered by history’s response to the Soviet Marxism-Leninism of the last century.
It’s become a cliche, but remains true, nevertheless, that “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”
And what’s worse, inflict them on others.
How about this for a catchy Obama bumper sticker:
“Hope our change works next time.”
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