magerette
Hedgewitch
- Joined
- October 18, 2006
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Forgive the extra long post, but I just came upon an interesting article/wild leftie rant by Michael Lind at Salon.com, stating "No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long conservative counterrevolution is over." It's definitely on the rhetorically inflammatory side, but it's not my intent to flame our residents on the right--just thought it made some, shall we say, *controversial* arguments worthy of a thought or two.
You can read it in its entirety here, and I'll quote some of the ideas that got my attention:
Here's a bit of economic fare:
So anyone see any truth in any of this, or is it all just a delusional victory lap from the suddenly hopeful left?
You can read it in its entirety here, and I'll quote some of the ideas that got my attention:
(You'll have to drill into the piece for his proofs as they are even longer than I'm willing to quote.)Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large. For four decades, from 1968 to 2008, the counterrevolutionaries of the right waged war against the New Deal, liberal internationalism, and moral and cultural liberalism. They sought to abolish middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, to replace treaties and collective security with scorn for international law and U.S. global hegemony, and to reverse the trends toward individualism, secularism and pluralism in American culture.
And they failed. On every front conservatives have failed, completely, undeniably and irreversibly. The failure of the right has left the structure of 20th-century American liberalism standing, battered and cratered but still intact....
Here's a bit of economic fare:
Then we come to foreign policy:Beginning in the 1970s, conservative and libertarian think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute devised "free market" alternatives to the American welfare state established by New Deal and Great Society liberals. These schemes were worthy of Rube Goldberg in their insane complexity. Social Security would be abolished and replaced by private savings accounts. Medicare would be abolished and replaced by health savings accounts. Unemployment insurance would be abolished and replaced by ... you guessed it, savings accounts...
This is why the destruction of Social Security -- the crown jewel of the New Deal welfare state -- was of such symbolic importance to the right. If Social Security could be whittled away by partial privatization and ultimately destroyed, then abolishing the rest of the modern liberal state would be a mere mopping-up operation...
.. While most are motivated by ideological hatred of government, the smartest enemies of the middle-class welfare state have learned to disguise their radical ideology and pose as neutral experts concerned that middle-class entitlements will bankrupt the country...
And with trumpets sounding, the somewhat (to my mind) premature celebratory conclusion:The counterrevolution of the right against liberal internationalism failed around the same time, early in George W. Bush's second term. In Bush's first term, the neoconservatives, whose influence had been limited in the Reagan years, called the shots. They rejected international law as a trap and argued that only an American monopoly of brute power, not great power cooperation, could achieve peace. The theory of conservative lawyers is simple: If the United States does it, it's legal, and if the president does it, it's constitutional...
Once again, the American people said no to the counterrevolution of the radical right. In the midterm elections of 2006, the voters tossed the Republican Party out of control of both houses of Congress. Since then, the remaining neocons in the administration have been purged or marginalized, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a pragmatic "paleoconservative" internationalist like Bush's father and James Baker, arrived to act as trustee in bankruptcy for the son's failed administration...
While as a commie hippy flower child I would like to believe at least some of this, I think we need to actually have the election before deciding that McCain is just as much a vindication of liberalism as his Dem counterpart, myself....The counterrevolution is over. For 40 years the radical right has sought to uproot and overturn the American domestic and global order created by centrist liberals of both parties between the 1930s and the 1970s. Liberalism has survived, while the right is not only defeated but also demoralized, dispersed and diminishing.
So anyone see any truth in any of this, or is it all just a delusional victory lap from the suddenly hopeful left?
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
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- 7,834