SubscribeThese days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.What is up with the fetishization of factory work on the "left"? It's not really the whole "left" but clearly there a sort of feeling among at lot of the more traditional left that we need to be spending more time in factories. But who cares? I guess it's more dignified then a service sector job, but it hardly seems like much fun.
The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There’s just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds – it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs.Framing the conversation, much?
Of course it's more subtle, and maintains more of the power structure, to try to keep the blacklist politics of exclusion rolling, trying to weed the undesirables out of your ideological movement (ad-hominem against the independent existence of an idea).
Broadly speaking, liberalism emphasizes individual rights. It seeks a society characterized by freedom of thought for individuals, limitations on power (especially of government and religion), the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports free private enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of all citizens are protected.[2] In modern society, liberals favor a liberal democracy with open and fair elections, where all citizens have equal rights by law and an equal opportunity to succeed.[3]
Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. ... Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.
Within a decade, the process was automatic – Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna....
“It’s also a cultural thing,” Sanders says. “A lot of these folks really don’t have a lot of contact with working-class people. They’re not comfortable with working-class people. They’re more comfortable with environmentalists, with well-educated people. And it’s their issues that matter to them.”
Part 1The central thesis here is that the central premise of 'Freedom' has been abstracted and co-opted by the corpo-tocracy – in Curtis' specific study, Britain's Conservative Party after a percieved failure of the (Liberal, Labor-dominatd) Public Service-class.
Part 2
Part 3
"I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birchand get nothing but a blank stare from my friend next to me. Sad, sad.
And I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church.
And I ain't even got a garage, you can call home and ask my wife!"
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posted by Pope Guilty at 7:23 AM on June 14, 2007