This is going around in circles. I get off unless we make some progress. Several points:
1. "Most" the following are good: competitive elections, universal suffrage, extensive civil and political liberties, democratic decisionmaking and state neutrality on basic values -- which are bad? Critics, what is your alternative? We can argue about free markets, but not with me, since I won't argue about that.
2. It's bullshit to say that liberalism is somehow linked to "Empire" (will someone please bury that Negri crap, what's wrong with the analytically precise word, imperialism?) without saying how. Not logically, obviously. Causally? Historically? Do we have to have imperialism to have free elections and civil liberties? Is that what you are saying? A nonimperialist state must be a repressive one-party dictatorship? Why ever think so?
3. Liberalism is a contested word, like all important words in political theory, like socialism or freedom or equality. Why give it up to the enemy? Why not tie it to John Stuart Mill rather than to Harry Truman -- mind you, Truman would look like a communist today, but calling the values, ideals, institutions, and practices I call liberal by that name isn't a neologism. It's a standard usage in political theory, political science, real world politics.
4. It seems to me that some of you want to seem to be in-your-face fuck-you spiky hair pierced-tongue radical. Much as I have sentimental attachments to red flags, singing the Internationale, hammers and sickles, pictures of olds Chuck -- I don't want to be weird. I want our ideas to appeal to little old ladies in Duluth on a fixed income, Appalachian miners, inner city single moms, out-of-work autoworkers in Detroit, Oklahoma farmers with backbreaking mortgages, ex-servicewomen with PTSD from what they saw in Iraq, truck drivers from Columbus Ohio, LA janitors, New Mexico data entry clerks, laid-off Arkansas engineers. I want us to be as American as apple pie.
Now, "liberal" may not be the way to do that, since a lot of these people think that liberals are transsexual communists from Hollywood who are zombie slaves to Hillary Clinton (this is the way a lot of folks see it, I'm not endorsing this as a negative stereotype, obviously, some of my favorite people are Hollywood transsexual sex slaves who support Hillary, but like many of my prejudices, this one isn't widely shared), but it's at least a word in the US political vocabulary.
What's your proposal for a term for these ideas that might connect with someone in America who, say, goes to church at least five times a year, unlike any of us? Why not fight to win back a word that does belong to us, dammit, and has had some real historical firepower in American politics?
Btw, interesting anecdotal fact: an intelligent, well-educated 14 year old boy, friend of my son’s, could not identify the source or meaning of the hammer & sickle used as a verbal expression in conversation. I don’t mean, he didn’t know that it signified the union of workers and peasants in Soviet Russia; I mean he didn’t associate it with _anything_. With some explanation about its provenance, he said, Oh, like Russia. But it had no meaning or resonance. He was also vague about Russia having been the Soviet Union. Of course this is all before he was born. I can’t but think that in some ways this amnesia is sorry, but if it’s generalizable it has political implications. Do we really want to be harnessed to a project of trying to bring the dead to life?
--- Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Why is it that liberalism, which has been the
> reigning political ideology since WW II, hasnt
> succeeded and most governments now are center-right?
> Should this history, and its explanations, not be
> included in the "substance" of the idea?
>
> 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.
>
> Doug
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