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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Let me help you out here.
“Liberals” think Clinton’s finest hour was bombing Yugoslavia. They don’t even know that Clinton bombed Iraq long before Bush. They forget that he bombed Sudan. They don’t even think about Haiti. They are not interested in the effects of economic sanctions on anyone else. Actually they’re not interested in anyone else unless a movie star says so. Clinton was nothing but two terms of “peace and prosperity.”
“Progressives” think Clinton is a murderous war criminal who laid the foundations for everything Bush did.
“Liberals” think Obama is “progressive.” They have no actual idea what Obama stands for. They voted and that’s it, end of responsibility. They’re just going to “wait and see” and “give him a chance.” They think he’s like Martin Luther King. They don’t know what Martin Luther King stood for either. Leaders lead and people just have to hope for the best.
“Progressives” know that Obama is just a hopey face on the imperial war machine. They know that Martin Luther King could never support Obama. They know that people have to make government work for them – likely through direct action like MLK did – even if the chances are slim.
“Liberals” read Salon magazine.
“Progressives” don’t.
Glenn Greenwald is the only reason to come to this site.
In Australia, the "Liberal" party is the more conservative of the two large parties. Wikipedia: "The party's philosophy is generally liberal conservatism, although it has moved rightwards since the 1980s."
In coalition with the smaller Nationals (also misleadingly named since they focus on the interests of rural communities and primary industries), the Liberals were in charge at the Federal level from 1996-2007.
All this made trying to explain to Australian schoolkids (who were trying to follow our election, bless them) what USians mean when they say "liberal" ... even more challenging. :)
I've always thought we needed liberals to bail others out of jail.
Seriously, the key problem with liberals is that they have no problem with deferring to Presidential power as long as their party has the White House. The phrase, "concentration of power" only bothers them when power is concentrated in a Republican's hands. Again & again, liberals fail to see that the same hardware which they use to run their programs, can easily be hacked by whichever unholy trinity for which the right agrees to pay.
As someone who has long maintained that our government's default position is pro-war; that it prefers corporate property to private property - or any other relation to property; that far too many voices go unheard, I've always felt both exasperation and admiration for our liberal siblings.
However, if I'm forced to claim a label, I prefer radical centrist. There is nothing particularly liberal or conservative about insisting that our Constitution gives more power to the Legislative than the Executive Branch or to work towards the day that we finally outgrow the Empire that T. Roosevelt saddled us with & return to our federal, republican roots.
Regardless of which political banner flies over your picnic, the starting point is to be skeptical of the system itself while keeping faith with those who try to make it work.
Not because the word Liberal has been Demonified by the Right -Wing reactionary media but for another reason. Only in the United States does the word Liberal have a Progressive or Left- Wing Connotation. In fact many Right Wing Parties around the world such as Australia and Japan are indeed the Liberal Party. Colombia's Liberal Party is also Conservative even though it belongs to Socialist International. The current President of Colombia Uribe who is about Conservative as one can get was a life long member of the Liberal Party until his first run for President. Even then he won as the "Independent Liberal" candidate although he is now just an Independent.
I will lay any bet with you, zoltan newberry, that you have never in your life known any such person as you have claimed in the following:
Quote"Gopi Saraswati Chandi I used to know in Dehli where the air is so polluted from your dirty coal and horrid Tata trucks and cars, you walk out of the house and a minute later your white dhoti is black from alla da smoke."
Unquote
The place "Dehli" does not even exist (at least not in India)!
Apart from being just the plain "garden variety knee-jerk jerk" as AJCalhoun appropriately observed, you are also the plain "garden variety knee-jerk liar" as well. That's par for the course for ReTHUGlicans like GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, .... (and, of course, zoltan newberry himself). And they're all down, DOWN, and doomed to go even lower, which is exactly where liars like them should be - permanently.
-- GSC
The term "liberal" implies excess to me. "Progressive" implies moving forward to a place of equality and justice. I like that much, much better.
Perhaps it’s true - ignorance is bliss. While I don’t shy away from “liberal” I’ve long preferred “progressive”. Lately I’ve been advocating that it’s high time we reclaim America’s proud liberal tradition (unionism, FDR’s New Deal, civil rights) and I’d hoped this was the thrust of Lind’s article, rather than a mishmash of historical references and the author’s notion that “progressive” is somehow mere euphemism. I’ve always remembered Reagan mentioning “the L-word” - being shocked that he would use this smarmy tactic to cast a pall of shame onto the Left - and I’ve been astounded at how effective this approach has been over the past couple of decades, during which time many who were once part of my Sixties generation have morphed into self-described “conservatives” and come to view “liberals” as effete, latté-drinking wimps who mysteriously “don’t get it”. These were, of course, the people who never really “got it” themselves back in the Sixties - wannabe hippies, the protesters who were just there to meet chicks. By the way, I’m dismayed to see Lind copping to the same sort of Sixties-dissing that too many writers indulge in today. “Deluded radicals” indeed - who says we despised the New Deal or the Great Society? Those were most assuredly steps in the right direction... oh wait, I mean the progressive direction.
It’s strange how words take on different connotations over time. In the Sixties, I came to equate “conservative” with words like: mean, uptight, narrow-minded, sexually-repressed - and frankly, I still do. But I recall at some point in high school being dumbfounded to learn that it was Southern Democrats who had been most notably racist. Democrats? How could this be? Democrats, I thought, were people who supported civil rights. They liked Black people - or at least they tried to - and inwardly fretted when they felt they might not be succeeding. Today one hears conservative terminology-twisters using the faulty logic that “Lincoln was a Republican” and “Lincoln freed the slaves” so why are these poor deluded Black people in the 21st Century strongly aligning themselves with Democrats? Well, times change - so do political parties - and especially the words bandied about to label them. Remember “Reagan Democrats”? “Log Cabin Republicans”?
Lind curiously refers to libertarianism as the extreme right wing of liberalism. Has he actually spoken with any Libertarians, I wonder? Those I’ve met struck me more as some bizarre wing of conservatism - indeed leading me to contemplate the notion that revolution turns things around all right - but if you go all the way around, you end up back at your original starting point. Libertarians today seek to abolish public education and deny that the population explosion is a real problem - perhaps global warming, too - hardly liberal viewpoints by any stretch.
I don’t agree that Liberals have necessarily resorted to the term Progressive as a euphemism, a way of pretending we’re something other than what we are. Perhaps some have... I had little awareness of centrist Democrats calling themselves “progressives” - though it makes sense in light of the profuse liberal-bashing on talk radio and Faux News. After all, if you can’t call yourself liberal, you must find another word to use - which indeed seems to have been Lind’s dilemma. I was ignorant about (or had forgotten) much of the history Lind points out in this piece. While it’s fascinating to be reminded that early 20th Century reformers of a certain ilk used “Progressive” (not to mention some obscure Germans in the 19th Century) it seems only sensible that most of us will use terminology in its current 21st Century incarnation.
Personally I’ve long associated the term “Liberal” with certain nice, particularly well-heeled folks who enjoyed martini lunches, drove Mercedes and BMWs, and lived in houses where I was more likely to be called in to perform repairs than invited as a dinner guest (though that wasn’t necessarily out of the question). In short, Liberals were the rich folk who were our friends, the ones who donated heavily to Democrats and supported causes I like: environmentalism, food and health care for the world’s needy, ongoing choice about abortion, civil rights, gay rights... and perhaps even peace. It would be nice to think Liberals are against capital punishment - and some are, of course - but I’ve been shocked and dismayed to learn Clinton (and apparently Obama) fail to oppose the death penalty.
As “more enlightened” rich folk, liberals’ money still came from somewhere - and in many cases it was inherited from ancestors whose social values may have been considerably more to the right, back when they amassed their fortunes. The term “liberal guilt” has long been used to describe the sensibilities of decent, well-educated sons and daughters of a certain segment of America’s wealthy families - fundamentally good people who have had their innate instincts for fairness and compassion confirmed and informed by the finest liberal education available. I have that sort of education myself, but I’ve never been wealthy and received my education on full scholarships - so, while I see Liberals as my friends and allies, I’ve always had difficulty identifying myself exactly as one of them. Perhaps I’m both progressive and liberal - but not “a Liberal”.
Perhaps Lind is precisely one of these folks - a true Liberal. His disdain for “deluded” Sixties radicals, for Castro and Ho Chi Minh, his shallow perception of the term Progressive as a mere “soulless ... manipulative exercise in rebranding” betray his biases. He’s certainly free to use the original “L-word” however he pleases. After all, liberal means freedom - so by all means, use it liberally. But then, as Jim Hightower says, trying to get people on the Left to agree on anything is like loading frogs into a wheelbarrow.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
