[lbo-talk] Tony Judt on the death of liberalism in America

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Thu Sep 14 09:34:01 PDT 2006



>From: "Colin Brace" <cb at lim.nl>
>
>Bush's Useful Idiots
>Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America
>
>full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html

Great article. Judt's filleting of cruise-missile liberals in the LRB is certainly more impressive than the hatchet job on Marxism that he does in the current NY Review of Books: <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302>

I guess Judt's ultimate aim is to bring back the golden age of *real* liberals. All I can say is, good luck with that. Of the avatars of golden-age liberalism whom he cites in the LRB piece -- Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty -- only two still stalk the planet: (1) Felix "The Fixer," Wall Street's ambassador to liberalism (and an obvious fraud from way back), and (2) Schlesinger, arch champion of the delusion that self-correcting cyclicality rules US politics. If the hope is perhaps to build a new movement under the aegis of "living treasures" of liberalism, that doesn't give much to go on.

Carl



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