Re: Liberalism (Was Re: Nietzsche)
On Jul 4, 2007, at 2:25 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
I thought the issue was about substance. The critics of liberalism (Carl, Carrol, Doug maybe?, certainly Charles and Yoshiem others) were saying that the political institutions and practices I called liberal were exhausted or inextricably bound up with something bad. I was challenging them to explain what they had that was better.
It’s not that the things you call “liberal” are bad. They’re not;
most of them are quite good. But by calling them “liberal” rather
than something else, you’re giving the likes of Ted Sorensen too much
credit. Bourgeois liberals would happily restrict political freedoms
if they interfered with their economic privileges. In fact, they’ve
done that many times. It was Wilson’s administration that sponsored
the Palmer raids and kept The Nation out of the mails during World
War I. Truman gave us purges and loyalty oaths. And Sorensen, via
Kennedy, gave us all that Cold War rhetoric. Fuck ‘em all.
Doug