Posted on 02/17/2005 6:31:56 PM PST by pissant
well said.
I really believe that's in the air. The internet is fuelling the idea that these far lefties are not alone in their beliefs, that there are millions of fellow travellers out there. Before they would mope around the public library, noticing the reading copy of The Nation is always in pristine, unread shape when they went to read it. Now they think they are an untapped force of elites who just know so much better than The Masses. And it's time for them to rise up and blah blah blah.
You are correct. Thomas Jefferson and some of the other founders may have been the creators of enlightened liberalism (in the US anyway). But the modern liberal in no way resembles that vision; conservatives do.
It's a democracy. Such a snob. Reminds me of Koppel's put down of Kucinich during a debate that he wasn't a "serious" candidate. Sharpton had a special advantage - he seemed to be the only coherent one.
Is DU the #1 liberal posting site? Are there any FR-like sites for the left that are a little more normal? (Or dare I say, moderate/conservative democrat?)
If anyone knows of any you can FReepmail me with the sites so we don't give them publicity. :P
I'd take Sharpton over Kerry as President any day of the week. That says boatloads about my regard for the Quisling from Mass.
I think that was really my point. As far as I know, there isn't a real Leftist alternative to FR. About the only site I know about that has halfway reasonable leftie discussions is Strauss & Howe's fourthturning.com. Even that is only palatable in small doses.
Wow, how did *that* get published in New Republic?
The author is the poobah editor, that's how.
When the left saw the same thing, they took the plunge into irrationalism - the old holdout of the European far right - deliberately. Worshipping foreign tyrants as "authentic", getting hot and bothered for Nietzche and his later French publicists, identity politics, the worship of youth rather than learning, slumming and waht Arendt called the "backstairs literature" of conspiracy - all of them were tropes of the irrationalist European far right when they had no reasonable arguments left. The left went for them the instant the old anti-communist wing of the party imploded.
The new left never had ideas on its side. It had sophistry and rhetoric and attitude. All of it borrowed from failed European radicalism of an earlier generation. Orwell, Koestler, and Arendt despised that radicalism, looked on it as a disease, a flight from reality. The new left was never about anything else. The cultural heights lost, they decided to fight on in the sewers.
For a while that gave them a certain catchet, it let them take over university departments in the humanities and social sciences for instance. But they took them over as a wrecking crew, not as thinkers. As soon as that was done, there was nothing to attract the young to the same old sophistry, so clearly empty and tired. Denouncing the patriarchy doesn't go very far with a young woman who has never met her father. Assailing privilege from positions of tenured comfort isn't very convincing, and radical relativist skepticism says nothing to young people who have literally never even encountered the belief in objective truth.
What are the great wits of the left up to these days? Recycled conspiracy crap, apologies for the most inhuman tyrants, antisemitism, thought police, a veneer of nature worship over crass self indulgence, partisanship without bounds, party directed hatred - look closely. That's Weimar. And not the Weimar of the left.
Well put.
You related to Darkwolf377?
. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength.
That would be the 45 million killed by liberal abortion.
FORTY FIVE MILLION!
Poor democrats, that would have been almost enough to
win the last election. Almost.
Yikes. For a multi-millionaire stock broker Peretz sounds like Arthur Miller at his most humorless and despondent. His Death of a Salesman shtick is getting funnier. Prior to the election in Nov. he wrote how much he disliked and saw through that phony Kerry but his rag, of which he is publisher, supported Kerry editorially. The whole bunch at the New Republic are just a bunch of incestuous, disappointed old lefties wondering what went wrong and why everybody ain't as smart as they. Occasionally they leave NYC to visit Europe but have no idea what the US is really about.
Clearly liberalism has no lack of words.
Just ideas.
Bump.
And why isn't he offering up his own vision of where his beloved party needs to go? Tough to travel the road when you do not have a destination. The socialism and communism they admired has failed, so there is no longer a rudder to steer the party. Their boat just drifts in smaller and smaller circles.
Marty Peretz owns The New Republic.
He can say what he wants...
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