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Understanding the Death of U.S. Liberalism

Comment by Larry Ross, September 22, 2006

For a long time I've wondered why, in the home of freedom and democracy, there is not more outraged liberal reaction to the phoney and contrived "wars on terror".

After reading Tony Judt's article, I now understand. It will not be surprising if Bush succeeds in converting America into a fascist state in all but name. That is because there does not appear to be much intelligent opposition to Bushism. Tony mentions so many prominent liberals who have quickly converted to defending and justifying Bush war madness against the newly coined but non-existent 'Islamo-fascism'.

Summing up the situation Tony wrote: "in today's America , neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them."

It is American independent radical thinkers with conscience who might save America. They can be Republican, Democratic, independent and of the right or the left. Their most important characteristic is a willingness to find and face the truth, then fearlessly speak truth to power in every possible way.

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Bush's Useful Idiots

Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America

London Review of Books, September 21, 2006

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration's sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

It wasn't always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle', it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word' and treating ‘liberals' and ‘liberalism' as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.'

The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals' are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking' investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books .

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement were born in most cases many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal centre in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example.

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