03.17.08
Why we’re liberals
Reading: Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America (Hardcover)
by Eric Alterman
and the Times review.
This is a companion to Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and cogently blasts through the near fascist nosedive of the last seven years.
The title is right: the attempted destruction of the term ‘liberal’ by the right-wing commentariat and think-tank battalions has succeeded, only to fail, because ‘we are all liberals’. The point requires an historical argument, to see that conservatives were born confused, always were confused and have failed in their attempt to make this confusion the dominant paradigm.
The reviewer expected perhaps a more theoretical approach, but at this point, a low-key slog through the almost mind-boggling malarkey of the Bush years.
More from the review:
He cites a recent poll showing the incredible transformation in public opinion when a candidate switched from the label “liberal” to “progressive” — from a score of negative 19 points to one of positive 17 points.
That seems a pretty strong argument for ignoring political brand identity long enough to ponder a different sort of problem. Immanuel Kant (a liberal) said the three questions facing philosophy were “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” and “What can I hope for?” Politics is philosophy continued by other means, so these puzzlers still apply.
Well, we know, from the polling data, that the right wing’s claim to speak for the majority of American opinion is untrue. But Alterman never really addresses what liberals (or progressives, or whatever) ought to do. Nor, subtitle notwithstanding, does he ever address what one might reasonably hope for in the post-Bush world.
The question of the history of liberalism is important, and the citation from the ur-liberal Kant is significant. In the era of Kant we see the inchoate (and still problematical) birth of the liberal world view in a form still uncorrupted by the later accretions of ideological capitalist, Darwinist, Social Darwinist, pragmatist overlays.
Liberalism next to the Enlightenment is the first born of the Protestant Reformation and needs to be recast in terms of a broader sense of history(’an idea for a universal history’, as with the study of the eonic effect) that is postdarwinian and not entangled in scientism, informed by the socialist left and able to break out of the retarded state of American democracy that long since fell behind the European social democracies.