Replies

The Left is wilfully blind to the enormous contributions that capitalism has made to democracy and individualism. Over the past two centuries capitalism has raised the standard of living and enhanced the health and life expectancy for untold millions in the West and elsewhere. It has stimulated new ideas and fostered free speech.

When they call for the redistribution of wealth, leftists are endorsing an authoritarian system that, wherever it has been tried, has resulted in economic stagnation and a sapping of cultural energy. Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. Without the profit motive, few are inclined to work for long. The play of the market, rather than government engineering, is more reliable for long-term job creation. When jobs are varied and plentiful, ethnic and racial tensions diminish.

Translation: the left was wrong.

Great catch - thanks for the post. Paglia is, I think, a very astute observer of a left that seems more to have driven away from her than she away from it.

The principal weakness of leftist political doctrine is, IMHO, an over-adherence to some of its Marxist roots, specifically that social class is to be defined in economic terms. If this is accurate then the class relationships that are the underpinnings of the Marxist historical dynamic are invalidated by the changing economic status, or as Paglia states In the US, salaries of skilled manual labourers have long exceeded those of mid-level office staff.

This is the real victory of the proletariat, not a "dictatorship" as Marx proposed, but a rise in economic status with regard to the bourgeousie that essentially eliminates their former class rivalry, at least in economic terms. In cultural terms this is debatable, and may be in part responsible for the red/blue nation split we noted in the last election.

There is a third measure beyond the economic and cultural, the political, the separation of which from the economic is not allowed under Marxist theory, nor is the class mobility which gave rise to it. America's self-proclaimed "ruling class" maps to economic or cultural classes very imperfectly, in fact, is rapidly becoming an entity of itself: Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. The left stubbornly refuses to recognize this fact, preferring to ignore this class in theory and attempt to suborn it in practice. This dichotomy describes where Lenin left Marx, but that was three-quarters of a century ago and the left is yet to really account for that, preferring instead to substitute murky jargon for theory and increasingly stale cliches for practice.

Marx had a phrase for this, too, "alienation." It wasn't supposed to happen to the left.

As smaller companies were swallowed up in transnational conglomerates...

When told that HillaryCare would force small businesses to close, Ms Clinton responded that she could not be responsible for "undercapitalised" businesses.

Small companies live in fear of reaching the magic number of 12 employees, at which point they become nationalized.

The Stalinists (DLC) are purging the Trotskyites (progressives) from the Democrat party. This is great. Turkel, Donahue, McKinney, Hilliard are all crying. The Democrat party simply does not have enough votes unless they can keep the progressives in the party. But it can't. Israel and corporate cash trump classic leftist ideology. Either progressives suck it in and wait for an opening, which doesn't suit their temperment, they go Green or they sit home and don't vote. A win for the GOP no matter what.

Paglia wants it both ways. She likes to preen about her glory days in the 60s and at the same time decry post-structuralism, the naive "misunderstanding of history" that flows logically from the very same period.

Paglia is a fun read, but she is wildly inconsistent. Like many of us, she bought into a whole lot of drivel in her youth, but even in late middle-age she can't bring herself to admit it. So she endlessly goes on about the hallowed 60s (it's a rare column when those days are not mentioned), but at the same time uses her rapier sharp mind to fillet the dunces who still take the politics of that time seriously.

Somehow Paglia's voice seems a little less forceful to me in these post-911 times. I'm not sure if it's because my perceptions of the world have altered radically, or if something in her voice has gone hollow. Maybe I just don't give a damn about fashionable straddlers like Paglia anymore.

I am surprised to hear a a Liberal with such a cogent understanding of the Modern left's suicidal dogma.

I'm gonna have to bookmark this one...

Bottomline she is saying that the left has to purge the old clique [They wont willingly change. That would be an acknowledgement of lifelong error.] in order for it to regain a powerbase. Her salience reveals the internal struggle that will keep the left hamstrung for the next twenty years while Conservatives appoint Supreme Court justices and federal judges across the land [The real power].

Prayerfully she will be attacked from her own ranks as opposed to embraced.

Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods, however, most leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort and privilege.

Hear...Hear I've always noticed that beneath every liberal is an elitist snob.

One problem is that too many leftist periodicals are run by callow cliques whose vaunted populism is a mask for snobbery.

Uhhhh??? Everyday Dems in congress and leftists speak despicable language. snobbery? hardly! Snottery it is, just like this article which in fact is a front for promotion of leftist snottery on TV and in mainstream (not even leftist) periodicals.