06-10-2016, 08:30 AM
(06-09-2016, 02:04 PM)Anthony Wrote: All I know is that while growing up I genuinely admired G.I. liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Gardner (who founded Common Cause), James Michener (whose Kent State: What Happened And Why exposed the spoiled-brat traitors for who and what they really were), John Lindsay, mayor of New York City in which I of course lived at the time, who denounced violence in a misguided attempt to bring about social change as, and I quote, verbatim, "cowardly and immoral," and also G.I.-Silent cusper Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later, I became a big-time admirer of Mike Royko).
Yes, these men were liberals - but they were Americans first.
So I really get burned up when some gross ignoramus calls me a right-winger.
The struggle between Marxism and liberalism is over. Liberalism won. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are gone. China and Vietnam preserved the dictatorial part of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and some of the official simulacra of the Marxist pantheon. The anti-American rhetoric in Cuba is becoming irrelevant and will likely die with Fidel Castro.
The "New Left" of the 1960s has lost all relevance, and in view of its destructiveness its irrelevance is a good thing. Ronald Reagan reshaped America in a way parallel to Andrew Jackson around 1840 -- also near the start of a 3T. But as with Jackson, the order that Reagan established showed its seams. The Free State/Slave State dichotomy may be far more severe than the "Red/Blue" divide today, but it is a partial parallel.
So what is more important today? The current Right-Left divide between people those believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as it makes people moral on the one side and those who believe that people can make conscious and rational choices of what is best for themselves. The Right has a traditional Anglo-American chauvinism connected to early settlement of America mostly by British and to a lesser extent German emigrants -- and the establishment of a slave system in the Old South. Descendants of the slaves have no nostalgia for the old hierarchy of the plantation that many Southern whites harbor to this day.
We do not have so much a struggle between tradition and modernity as we have between differing traditions.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.