Monday, May 09, 2011
Sam Smith on the death of liberalism and what to do about it
With the end of the Great Society, Democrats began a steady retreat from liberalism climaxing in Clinton and Obama with their systematic dismantling of liberal programs and paradigms. As Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report, put it recently, “President Obama seems positively eager to dismantle the safety nets put in place in the thirties and strengthened by a black-led movement in the sixties.”
Among the greatest victims of this retreat have been economic decency, social democracy and civil liberties. It was not that the new liberal aristocrats actually opposed them; it just didn't matter much to them. Liberalism was no longer a matter of masses yearning to breathe free, but of boomers yearning for an SUV and millennials for a new I-Something.[Progressive Review Undernews, The death of liberalism and what to do about it, 5/9/2011]
Click the link and read this article. It’s impossible to give a sense of Sam’s articles from a snip.
Ok, one more snip. Does the first sentence fit Hawaii?:
Most striking was the disappearing interest in those at the bottom. Liberal city councils went after the homeless, pandered to developers, and engaged in other forms of socio-economic cleansing. The Clinton administration attacked welfare in a manner once limited to the Republican right; prison populations soared without a murmur from the liberals; Democrats supported without question a cruel and unconstitutional war on drugs; they joined the war on two centuries of public education; and liberal media aristocrats prided themselves in faux realpolitik and patronizing prescriptions for the masses. Obama gave freely to the banks but hardly noticed the foreclosed.
…
Through it all, the liberal aristocracy was the dog that didn't bark. Just as Sherlock Holmes' creature failed to warn of an intruder, so America's liberal leadership failed repeatedly to warn of infringements of civil liberties, of unconstitutional acts and legislation, or to rise to the defense of people beyond its own class.
Post a Comment
Requiring those Captcha codes at least temporarily, in the hopes that it quells the flood of comment spam I've been receiving.