Comments on: Liberalism

By: Jim S

Jim S — Tue, 24 May 2005 02:33:01 +0000

Ah, yes. The intellectual vigor of ideas such as “defending marriage”, banning stem cell research, making certain that a certain version of Christianity has the right to determine how people who don’t follow it must nonetheless follow its tenets by enshrining them in law and cutting taxes over and over again when there is a war to pay for. The sheer thrill of proposing that every program that does anything for the least advantaged of our populace must pay the price to enable those tax cuts while pork continues to run rampant.

By: Joel Thomas

Joel Thomas — Mon, 23 May 2005 19:27:29 +0000

I do agree that liberalism has a positive enduring legacy. Thus I find it somewhat amusing that Jonathan agrees that liberalism is dead but seemingly had no problem availing himself of the benefits of one of those enduring liberal ideas — the public university.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 23 May 2005 19:19:33 +0000

I'm sorry: Did a conservative just say that liberals pay too little attention to John Dewey? Seriously: Dewey and Niebuhr--who are real intellectual heavyweights, unlike (sorry) Victor Davis Hanson--get plenty of attention. Consider this Google search for John Dewey on The Nation's website (and this one for Niebuhr). Compare that search with this one for John Dewey, which pretty clearly demonstrates that NR's writers have no idea what they're talking about (John Dewey is lumped together with Alfred Kinsey and Alger Hiss, a grouping that makes no sense unless the organizing principle is "people NR disagrees with"--justifiably so in Hiss's case). An even more embarrassing search, this one for Jurgen Habermas (here), is almost prima facie evidence that NR--not liberalism--is out of touch with 'real' academic work.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 23 May 2005 18:46:13 +0000

Liberalism isn’t dead, it’s the status quo. Social security, equality for women, work safety regulations, child labor laws, minimum wage laws; these are all liberal policies and ideas, and the most conservatives can do (at least so far) is tinker around the edges of them.
Our “conservatives” are busily intervening in foreign countries — the ones that are largely autocratic, theocratic, and/or patriarchal, and are trying to make them less conservative and more liberal.

By: Joel Thomas

Joel Thomas — Mon, 23 May 2005 17:03:35 +0000

Liberalism isn’t dead. It’s in hibernation and the sound of the snoring is awful. If liberalism were truly dead, the national Republican party would not have assumed as much of the “big government, big spending” mantle that it has.
Clinton won elections, but the Democrats in general did not.

By: Nash

Nash — Mon, 23 May 2005 15:42:13 +0000

Welcome, Jonathan.
Here, you state your overall goal:
“A few have argued that liberalism has failed to inspire any positive movement in the Democratic Party in a long time.Others, including Howard Dean, are arguing that the only thing wrong is the Democratic marketing machine. I suspect that the answer is found somewhere in between, but would like to explore the topic a bit.”
but it in no way squares with the remainder, e.g., this:
“Jonah Goldberg argues that the fact that liberals rarely, if ever, invoke liberal icons like John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, or TNR founder Herbert Croly, demonstrates that liberalism is “dead.” Goldberg is right.”
All of your weight is on the front foot here–you open with two extremes and then proceed to argue from the point of exactly one of them.
Actually, and not to be offensive, that is a very Goldbergesque rhetorical inconsistency, so maybe citing him here is appropriate.
Unless you actually want to say the entire blog was your process of thinking out loud and that you didn’t come to the writing table with any preconceived notions. Not likely, that, though.
So, I’d just like to say that I, for one, am quite tired of writers who find some need to create false bona fides (an oxymoron, perhaps?) for themselves , in terms of their unbiased approach to the discussion at hand. Why not just say it from the start? You don’t think the Democratic Party’s problem is packaging and you don’t think Democrats have fresh ideas.
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?