shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> I don't think there is a Welfare Liberal left in the u.s., so I can't
> imagine there being enough of them to comprise a 'wing'.
>
What all liberals and progressives, as well as all too many Marxists, share in common is a belief in the Certainty of Progress. Few I imagine would express it this baldly, but I think you can see them reveal their fundamental stand, The Certanty of Progress, by the vocabulary they use when they describe the positions of those who affirm contingency rather than direction is fundamental to human history. Believers in Progress either simply cannot understand this position it is so foreign to their thought or are so frightened by it that they fend off the possibility by mocking those who have it.
See Michael Loewy in the November 1998 Monthly Review, for the most concise statement of this alternative to Liberal Optimism and references to the basic texts theorizing that oppositon.
Probably the ultimate source of Liberal Optimism is the Optimism of the 18fth-c, formulated in the view that this is the best of all possible worlds.
The view that Capitalism itself embodies this historical principle of Progress is most vigously upheld by those who think that it could only have arisen in an _advanced_ society, and therefore try to find its origins in the greater civilizations of Asia rather than in that little muddy spot, at the periphery of the periphery of major world civilizations, England, where the virus first took effect. More advanced civilizations were immune to it.
Carrol