On Jul 3, 2007, at 12:28 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> What's your alternative? Which of:
>
> competitive elections
> universal suffrage
> extensive civil and political liberties
> democratic decisionmaking (as opposed to imposition of
> someone's idea of the good life will-we-nil-we)
You keep listing these as attributes of liberalism, but 19th century liberals weren't terribly interested in lots of them; they were all for economic liberalism, but opposed to it in the political sphere, because the masses might vote to expropriate the expropriators. There was a bourgeois movement in the 1870s, for example, to limit the franchise in New York to property owners, with The Nation's E.L. Godkin as one of its leaders. Radicals gave this content to what you're calling liberalism - why cede these virtues to the followers of Herbert Spencer?
Doug