[pissant]

Interested read from one of the more responsible Liberal publications.

[expatpat]

Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture?

Karl Marx.

[Darkwolf377]

" an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell Kirk"

Both of whom were more prominent and thoughtful than any liberal thinker of the same era.

[RBroadfoot]

Very interesting. Apparently, some liberals -- a very few -- are capable of honest self-appraisal.

Meanwhile, the majority of liberals appoint Dr. Dean head of their political party ... the guy who said, "I hate Republicans and I hate everything they stand for" ... and openly proclaim their hatred of President Bush.

At least we know which is indeed the party of hate.

[JFK_Lib]

Good article.

Why is it that al Sharpton, every bit as racist as David Duke, continues to get equal treatment in the press?

[IronJack]

Russell Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual who, as Clinton Rossiter (himself a moderate conservative) wrote, has "begun to sound like a man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country."

And yet the ideas of Russell Kirk, or more accurately, his analysis of the ideas of others compounded with his own insights, resonate today with a whole new generation of conservatives.

What's old is made new again, while the stale, obsolete ideas of the "progressive" movement are embarrassingly out of date, kind of like an over-the-hill former cheerleader who insists on wearing the clothes from her salad days. Problem is, what looked good on a supple 18-year-old in 1960 just looks silly on a sagging grandmother in 2005.

The rest of the world grew up. The Left didn't.

[Darkwolf377]

"This patronizing attitude is proof positive that, as deep as the social and economic gains have been among African Americans, many liberals prefer to maintain their own time-honored patronizing position vis-à-vis "the other," the needy. This is, frankly, in sharp contrast to President Bush, who seems not to be impeded by race difference (and gender difference) in his appointments and among his friends. Maybe it is just a generational thing, and, if it is that, it is also a good thing. But he may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias."

It's nice to see a liberal giving Bush credit in this area, though of course the then dives into the "we still need Affirmative Action" spiel.

I think the whole point of this article is sound but he gives no real solutions, and should not. You can't plan where a party is going to end up after everything falls apart, but I think many DU-MoveOn-Deaniacs are so sick of being losers they will be unwilling to back a Dem who will be almost as bad (to them) as Bush, and will create a new Progressive Democrat party or something--maybe even a Green party of some substance. Problem is it's going to take at least a couple decades to get anywhere electorally so that winning a presidency is going to have meaningful support in congress and the state level.

[JennysCool]

Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus.

Ward Churchill?

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

How about this - liberal secular humanism is just wrong. Wrong ethically, historically, ontologically, culturally, spiritually, and psychologically. It is a war against nature, the nature of man, and God. It can never work because it goes directly against the needs and true ends of man. It creates false images and false hopes. It derails civilization from the noblest ideals and virtues of humanity. It reduces man to the level of an animal and then sets about caging him in in an artificial social engineering zoo.

[DoctorMichael]

Its getting late. Bump for later reading.

[filbert]

A Good Start.

The vibrant, rough-and-tumble but generally civil discussions here on Free Republic and elsewhere between conservatives, libertarians, etc. is a sign of the health and vigor of "the right."

An indication that the left is getting past the politics of hate and emotion would be the success of similarly robust and thoughtful sites discussing and debating the day's events from their world view.

Certainly DU ain't it.

[JennysCool]

The vast majority of the public doesn't realize that the labels "liberal" and "conservative" don't mean what they did 30 years ago. Today, it's the "liberals" who trample over freedom, in their zeal to have an ordered society where no one smokes, no one overeats, and no one says anything which might remotely offend anyone. It's the "conservatives" who'll light your smoke for you, tell an off-color joke once in awhile, and throw barbecues featuring fat hamburgers and intoxicating cocktails.

Most of the public, which doesn't pay as much attention to these things as we do, still believes the "liberals" are the free-wheeling, fun-loving bunch, rather than the stormtroopers they are at heart. We "conservatives" need to educate them. At our next barbecue.

[blanknoone]

I would actually like the opportunity to ask the author, 'what does it mean to be a 'liberal'?

My perspective is that political philosophy is rooted in the more foundational aspects of philosophy. Metaphysics and epistemology give rise to ethics and aesthetics, and ethics gives rise to group ethics/politics. The conservative movement is rooted in Judeo-Christian philosophy. The left is rooted in Kantian philosophy and its communist extensions.

My take is that the author bought all of the touchy feely propaganda designed to simultaneously mask and advance communism without ever realising what it all really meant. Now it seems he has seen his entire perspective stripped of its veneer, and he realizes that he is either a communist, which he has been telling himself for years he isn't and is an obviously failed ideology, or he is nothing. He is staring into both the mirror and the abyss at the same time.

[Shermy]

The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. Early in the race, it was clear that he--like Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich--was not a serious candidate.

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.

[brbethke]

Wow, how did *that* get published in New Republic?

[JasonC]

False as a matter of intellectual history about the 60s and the New Deal era. The left did not have better ideas then. They had already lost the real intellectual debate, at the peaks of the culture. They just didn't know it yet, and the shallow pseudo intellectuals among them, who only believe ideas they are told to believe in and cannot examine real arguments on two sides of a question and tell who actually has the truth on their side, continued to believe they were enlightened and the right stupid because that is what they wanted to believe. Socialism was refuted by 1922, by Mises. The bright lights on the left saw as much at the latest by the end of WW II - Orwell, Koestler, Arendt. Hayek had already written "Road" by then. The classical liberals had seen that they had to side with the old conservatives.

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.

[tet68]

. 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.

[Shisan]

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.

[Uncle Miltie]

Clearly liberalism has no lack of words.

Just ideas.

[MNnice]

Still, liberals know that the right's ideologically framed--but class-motivated--retreat of the government from the economy must be resisted. There will simply be too many victims left on the side of the road.

This is the heart of liberalism.  Their undying belief that people are generally too stupid to take care of themselves, and that collectivism is the natural order of things.  I remember watching a Bill Clinton speech a few years ago and he lamented that the republicans were going to leave people to "fend for themselves."  I yelled at the TV, "Some people call that freedom, you moron!"

I find it amazing that the left today is struggling to find their core belief system, their message.  If they are so opposed to conservatism, which stands for the private property rights and the power of the free market, which requires less taxation, less regulation and less litigation, then surely it should be obvious to them that they are for the opposite ... MORE taxation, MORE regulation, and MORE litigation and less private property rights.  But they can't face that fact because they know it's an electoral loser.  So they have to find a different message that will enable them to regain power without having to tell the voters who they are.

 

 

[scottywr]

The fact is that even after 35 to 40 years of liberal bombardment in the media and academia, the conservative base of the US has not been defeated. Ultra-liberaliam will come and go and the natural conservatism set fourth by our founders will win the day.