As a vocal and active card carrying progressive and a reluctant liberal Democrat, I receive almost daily political emails from my less progressive relatives and friends. Most of these emails are jokes poking fun at Democrats that I actually find clever and funny. Some point out actual stupidities and weaknesses of the target. I say, right on! (more…)
I live in a Republican county and some Republicans here, bless their hearts, don’t really understand what a liberal really stands for. So they make stuff up, or more aptly, they repeat the words of their great conservative teachers, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly from radio and TV.
In their definition of liberals they say the same things over and over as if we all alike “singing the same tune”. They are not only out of touch with reality, but also tone deaf! However we liberals do agree on some points. For example: We tend to care about other people, many of whom we don’t even know—even people from other countries. We believe that everybody should get an even break in life such as access to a good education and health care.
Our Republican neighbors don’t understand and are afraid that we want to take away all their money and will ruin the moral fabric of the country. Here is my answer to their comments, which you have probably already heard and which I will therefore omit. (more…)
LANCASTER, England:
More and more, it appears that in the 21st century we are returning to the economics of the 19th, where wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few owners and astute speculators.
Neither the Right nor the Left seem capable of creating a society in which all benefit from increased prosperity and economic security.
Right-wing claims that free markets will enrich all sections of society are palpably false, while the traditional European welfare state appears to penalize innovation and wealth-creation, thereby locking the poor and unskilled into institutionalized poverty and unemployment. (more…)
This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
This short, loosely organized collection of occasional essays makes for a surprisingly interesting and valuable book, well worth reading and pondering. Sociologist and radical activist Todd Gitlin, who has been a figure in the American Left since his Vietnam-era days in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has made a serious effort to reflect on the failures of the American Left since the 1960s. The criticisms he puts forward here, which are inevitably self-criticisms in part, are unsparing and penetrating, made all the more memorable by his unacademic, direct, and often epigrammatic style.
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