Posted on 02/21/2011 8:35:41 PM PST by neverdem
IN THE TUMULTUOUS HISTORY of postwar American Liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which the Liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. This pose has called for admirable discipline, for the evidence was all around them. Yet Liberals, who began as the rightful heirs to the New Deal, carried on as a kind of aristocracy, gifted but doomed. They dominated the culture and the politics of the country unchallenged from the beginnings of the Cold War to the first Nixon administration. With the general populace, however, they increasingly faltered. Now they are down to around 20 percent of the electorate. They have the nation's librarians, most of the professoriate, students so long as they remain relatively untaxed, labor leaders, and career Democrats. After that it gets tricky. Conservatives accounted for 42 percent of the vote in the recent election, maintaining roughly a 2-1 margin over liberals, which has been true for decades. In the last election, the independents, the second most numerous group, voted with conservatives. They were alarmed about the economy, and will probably remain alarmed for a long time.
Liberals are going the way of the American Prohibition Party. It is time for someone to tell them: "Rigor mortis has set in, comrades." They could be oblivious during the Nixon Crisis or while Ronald Reagan sleepwalked through history, as many Liberals still say; but today their obliviousness amounts to a kind of madness. The house is afire, but there is a whole string ensemble madly playing their fiddles.
AT FIRST GLANCE, the decline might appear to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy when historians noted the first sightings of what was to become Liberalism's distinctive trait, overreach. At times Liberals promise too much. At times they attempt too much. Occasionally, they...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
If we believe this we will have lost. We must keep pushing the Conservative principles forward and defeat the liberal evil or we will perish as a free country.
If we can gain the House, Senate, and the Presidency in 2012 we will have to implement draconian cuts and policies to the parts of Government that transfer wealth and the leaches who get cut off will scream so loud, and with the help of the Press, could possibly sabotage a true recovery. We MUST have the backbone and willpower to keep going and return this country to it’s once prosperous and powerful state even with the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Left.
We will have to remain united in spirit and at the polls even though the medicine will be bitter because everyone will feel the sting that will occur to get our country back on the right track.
Dead except Hollywood, the newspapers, the network news, highschools, colleges, the executive branch, the senate, most judges, google, wikipedia, and most large metro areas.
Hitler was dead and Germany was utterly destroyed, too.
(Ping to a premature declaration of death.)
Liberalism is unfortunately not dead.But it does not hurt to wish it upon them.Indeed it would be great if more of us did so.
Its current iteration is Utopian, as liberals segue into a desperation born of several generations of episodic failure. It is Utopianism at any cost, as we caneasily see in the curent federal budget, and in our now ally betrayal foreign policy.
They follow a charismatic leader whose race card avocation proclaims lock step populism, fear mongering, devisive maniplulation of the masses, and hatred of our very own history. IN short he is a demagogue.
Liberalism has become desperate, it is now a liberal fascist movement as predicted by Jonah Goldberg in his seminal, annotated work: “Liberal fascism, The Secret History of America’s Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” Of course the politics of meaning means the social mechanism of political correctness , which subverts the ideal of personal liberty in America.
These liberal fascists beg destruction, but they seek to bring it to America first as the final sordid, paryoxism of the dying gasps of a now draconian,retrograde, national socialist political philosophy, sold by Barack Obama -Barry Soetoro (we do not really know who he is.)
May God and Country remove their curse from us.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html
I agree with Tyrell's conclusion -- but am not nearly so sanguine about liberalism dying quickly (or quietly).
Odd how his history of conservativism glisses smoothly from the fifties to Richard Nixon's first term. (Richard Nixon!?)
Whatever happened to Barry Goldwater, Emmett...???
The headline is ridiculous. Liberalism has its claws deeply embedded into almost every institution in this country.
Exactly! And it will continue to infect us for a long time.
Actually, liberalism has been dead as an ideology. As pointed out, McGovern was the last presidential candidate to call himself a liberal (although Mondale did at the end in 1984, after denying it the whole campaign...but he knew he was dead meat, ditto for Dukakis). The ones that did win had to fight the term ‘liberal’ like crazy. Dukakis is the one that I remember the most...and then he stepped in it by saying he was good with flag burning and (in a debate) saying that he would not want to see the hypothetical rapist of wife executed, since he opposes capital punishment. In that campaign (1988) Dukakis was actually winning against Bush-41, until Bush’s people (led by the legendary Lee Atwater, RIP) figured out that people considered Dukakis more conservative than Bush. The Bush team put an end to that, with it’s “Read my Lips” pledge...and coasted to election. Their only problem after winning was not accepting what got them there...same with Bush-43, starting right after his re-election (and before, to a lesser extent).
Too early to make such statements. Two years ago, the liberals were all proclaiming a permanent majority.
I find Emmett’s comments as silly as the many Freepers who were singing the praises of Scott Brown:
“Scott Brown for President!”
Just sayin’
Hayek was brilliant!
No, socialism is alive and well and will destroy this country if there is not a big backlash in 2012 against the Marxist in chief. The government is getting pretty scary and the schools are putting out idiots.
Ludwig Von Mises site has an economics professor who has examined the textbooks at elite graduate schools and they teach lies....absolute junk, so that our educated will be little Karl Marxes after they graduate. We need to overthrow our corrupted educational system where our textbooks are being written and funded by some of the (Ayers) most vile and evil men...and CAIR.
They want our children to be conditioned to respond in one way (Pavlov and Skinner) and their methodologies are designed to make them into little secular atheist Marxists.
Of course, Lenin knew brainwashing children was the way to get control of a country.
As long as there are people who want the government to control everything, liberalism will be around in some form. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Although liberals like to call themselves “progressives,” hoping to infer “enlightened,” and “objective,” the liberal arts reached their heights in the medieval ages, as the primary defense against an emerging “scientific method” of inquiry, that allowed individuals to conduct their independent inquiries and experiments and come to their own conclusions — rather than accepting as truth, what the hierarchy of authority, wished to act as the sole arbiter of the truth in every matter.
As such, the “liberal arts” were the ancient world’s trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, buttressed by the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music — still hoping to hold sway, in the modern world that enables and empowers every individual to do their own research and thinking, rather than accepting the authority, of those predetermined to be highly esteemed, which are invariably the people ensconced and sinecured at liberal institutions, ie., the universities, church, government and media.
So not surprisingly, they wish to preserve this system of status and privilege, and use their skills in the liberal arts, to convince everyone else, that such a system should continue, as the enlightened path of society and civilization — and not that everyone should really be equal — but they should be “more equal” than everyone else, and entitled to everyone else’s share of the pie also, because they have “sacrificed” themselves in the service of the public good to be their leaders. Otherwise, they would be gods.
But because of the superiority of their compassion, they chose to serve mankind, by serving themselves, and distinguish themselves by doing the thinking for everyone else. Thus the distinctive quality of liberalism, is the repeating of one daily mantra posted by the Democratic Underground and Daily Kos, of the talking points, every member of the liberal wing must repeat in solidarity, to combat and drown out the cacophony of many individuals thinking and speaking for themselves — which should be proof enough, that they don’t know the mandated political correctness of the day, and how it must be repeated faithfully without questioning that authority and their entitlements.
The author makes some interesting points in his article but I have to disagree with the premise. Conservatism has its historical luminary giants such as Burke, Hamilton, Churchill, Buckley, Rand, Lincoln, Coolidge, Reagan, etc. Certainly, Liberalism has its share of giants including Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, etc, but the author makes it sound as though the modern Liberal has no historical model to follow. While the majority of us do not encounter those names every day, virtually everyone who has attended college was asked to read or study their histories. High School and College instructors are overwhelmingly liberal and that influences the delivery of the material to our children. Journalists are also overwhelmingly liberal. Until Conservatives balance those fields we are assured of continued Liberal ideology in our politics.
Worse still is that I believe the Liberal ideology is deeply embedded and emboldened in American society today. They lurch so far to the left as Barry Soetoro has and then dare to claim to be moderate. I think Conservatism was on its death bed for a long many years and is now beginning to return to health but there is much more work to be done. I think this author has it all wrong and backwards. Conservatism is just getting back on its feet while Liberalism is entrenched for a fight. It would be very wrong for Conservatives to be filled with false bravado. That article borders on irresponsible journalism.
In the spirit of “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory”, I’ll believe liberalism is dead when I see the body.
It’s because they have won. Republicans today would have been classified as left-wing radicals in the 50’s.
Liberalism is dead undead.
American Spectator had a trilogy of articles about liberalism. I pinged you to the thread with the other story and a link to the other.
Having no causes and crusades to fight for, they have to invent them. Up to this point, they've been able to bribe their constituencies at the state and federal level but they've tapped the till too much and now its empty.
The other problem liberalism has is that most of their programs are just ... hmmm ... what's the word I'm looking for? ... nutty? ... goofy? ... DOWNRIGHT INSANE???
People Eating Tasty Animals is a joke everywhere I've heard the acronym PETA. Having no racism to fight anymore, they have to invent it. But most of America believes that the proposition that only whites can be racist is just plain goofy.
Oh well, I could go on for hours, probably days like this.
Godspeed
8^)
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