Isn't it pretty clear that liberalism (the ideology) flourished with middle-class prosperity, and and now that middle-class prosperity is becoming a thing of the past, so is liberalism.
Ideas can be argued abstractly, but ultimately their test is whether people want them in the everyday world. In the present world, to borrow from Negri and Hardt, liberalism is too obviously the handmaiden of Empire, and is now being confronted by Multitude. Are all the liberals out there really willing to share their wealth and grant an equal vote to the impoverished third world masses?
Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
On Jul 4, 2007, at 2:25 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> I thought the issue was about substance. The critics
> of liberalism (Carl, Carrol, Doug maybe?, certainly
> Charles and Yoshiem others) were saying that the
> political institutions and practices I called liberal
> were exhausted or inextricably bound up with something
> bad. I was challenging them to explain what they had
> that was better.
It's not that the things you call "liberal" are bad. They're not; most of them are quite good. But by calling them "liberal" rather than something else, you're giving the likes of Ted Sorensen too much credit. Bourgeois liberals would happily restrict political freedoms if they interfered with their economic privileges. In fact, they've done that many times. It was Wilson's administration that sponsored the Palmer raids and kept The Nation out of the mails during World War I. Truman gave us purges and loyalty oaths. And Sorensen, via Kennedy, gave us all that Cold War rhetoric. Fuck 'em all.
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