The left: still dying (was Re: European Unions)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Apr 8 13:17:37 PDT 2001


Justin Schwartz wrote:


>It was me who posted the comment about the right on the higfh
>intellectual ground. And I stand by it. They moved from the Stupid
>Party to the party bristling with vigorous ideas, all the way from
>high justificatory theory (Buchanan, Becker, Posner, Epstein,
>Nozick, etc.) to middle-range policy proposals of the sort cranked
>out by think tanks, to low brow pundits.

VIgorous ideas? They mainly boil down to markets good, government bad - or, in that wonderful line from John Forbes, invoking "necessity, meaning what rich Americans want...." Once you get down below the level of the high-domes, you're deep in the purest crap - from wild assertion to pure lying. I was amazed to learn from today's NYT that there's not a single example of a U.S. farm ever being lost to the inheritance tax - but the right-wing pundit machine repeated that lie endlessly. Unlike EPI, which produces original and serious research, the right-wing think tanks pump out little more than propaganda.

Sometimes I worry about you Justin - you take these people far more seriously than they deserve. Intellectually, I mean; you've got to take them seriously as instruments of power. But as intellectual forces, they're modern-day Says.

Doug



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