I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime. Europe is cutting back on its Government to make up for enormous budget shortfalls. Cuba has admitted communism is a failure. Patriotic Americans have staged a massive electoral revolt in America. Obama’s being forced to keep the Bush tax cuts that saved us from the disastrous downturn of 9/11 and brought us stellar job growth and prosperity over the last decade. Is this the end of leftism or am I celebrating too quickly?
Oh, boy, this’ll end well.
(Nothing to do with your thesis, you understand - it’s just that you seem to have chosen to word your OP in such a way as to - IMO, unnecessarily - needle liberals. Not the best way to start if you want to keep civil discussion, not to mention keep it out of the Pit and in GD.
Then again, your username makes your political outlook pretty clear. :))
Don’t worry about it.
“the Bush tax cuts that saved us from the disastrous downturn of 9/11 and brought us stellar job growth and prosperity over the last decade”
No one believes this. No one. I’m a conservative, and I don’t believe this. It is an objectively false statement. Real conservatives might argue that things would have been worse without the tax cuts, etc., but no one would describe what the US experienced over the last few years as “stellar job growth and prosperity.”
Stellar job growth and prosperity?
Here’s a table of the average GDP growth by President and the jobs created by Presidential term. Note Bush’s job creation numbers suck even if you just look at his first term, prior to the recession.
So maybe “stellar” in the sense of “pre-cursor to a black hole”, but otherwise, not so much.
Budget shortfalls which, coincidentally, seem to be part of a fallout of the greater worldwide economic downturn. You know, like what happened here. You might have read about it in the news. I seem to recall some sort of housing bubble being blamed- you know, Capitalism.
I thought we were talking about Liberalism, not Communism? Or is everything to the left of center now “communist”?
An electoral revolt which wasn’t as massive as the one they staged in 2008, amirite?
You’ve got an… *interesting *take on history, I’ll give you that. I’m sure you’ll be back soon with numbers to back up that statement.
No, no- by all means, celebrate. It’s never too early for a party.
I should, of course, note that the original poster’s user name is fairly clearly Howard Roark, the main character of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, combined with George W. Bush’s presidential number, #43. This may have some point as to where his attitudes stem from.
I confess, I’m slightly confused as to where communism became part of liberalism. Liberalism is the belief in the importance of individual liberty and human rights. Communism is a bit of the opposite of that. In fact, if one reads John Locke, it rather seems to contain the concept that the rights of man include life, liberty, and property.
I don’t think Mr. Roark is a very good Randite.
No, it ended in 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept into office for two terms.
No, wait - it ended in 1994, when the Republicans took control of both houses of congress.
Oh, wait - it ended in 2000, with George W. Bush’s election.
Come to think of it, liberalism is always dying, and conservatives’ addiction to their success mantra (probably a reaction to Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964) is always causing them to ‘celebrate’ early. [SIZE=“2”][SIZE=“1”]See “Mission Accomplished!”[/SIZE][/SIZE]
And I’m sure that after the Republicans fail to fix things and lose power, and the Democrats get in power and do the same, we will witness one more historic, last-time ascent of conservatives to power, and THAT will be the death of liberalism.
Until…
Seriously, anyone in a celebrating mood these days is either in denial or indulging in the mindless tribalism that the right has grown so fond of. The budget crisis is real, BOTH parties contributed to it, and both parties are going to have to give things up if we don’t want to end up a banana republic. Enjoy your celebrating.
If it is it was murdered by the greedy, scheming, lying, corrupt, incompetent capitalists who we had to hand our pensions, jobs and public sector spending to, to prevent an even worse disaster.
There should be trials, sentences and executions.
Communists vs. Patriots in a cage match to the death! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
This should be obvious to a Randian: absolutely not. America is still one of the most conservative nations. Just like anyone from Fox News will tell you, the rest of the world is all librulz.
No, you’re not celebrating too quickly. If the last few elections have taught us anything, it’s that all trends continue forever and the rosiest predictions of partisan optimists always come true in every way.
With their populations aging, I’m not sure how sustainable Western welfare states are into the distant future. Equating that with the death of liberalism worldwide is ridiculous. So is describing the U.S. midterm elections as a ‘massive revolt.’ It was a reversal from 2008, but it reflected frustrations with the economy that caused the Democrats to lose some independent voters, and was not a philosophical rejection of liberalism. On top of that, the results weren’t even that unusual: it’s common for the party to control the White House to lose seats in midterms (although not usually that many), and as usual, midterm voters were older and whiter than the general election voters. That is, a lot of the people who voted against the Democrats in November were by and large people who didn’t vote for Obama in the first place. The fact that they still didn’t support him in 2010 does not constitute a revolt. If Obama’s win in 2008 didn’t constitute a revolt (and it didn’t), I’m not sure how an election with much lower turnout can be a revolt.
You may have heard the expression, the history of civilizations is capitalism on the way up, socialism on the way down. I suppose you can judge for yourself where we are on the curve.
Europe does not have a government. Europe is a continent which contains several dozen nations, each with a separate government. Some have trimmed government budgets but most haven’t, at least not significantly. For those that have, there’s no particular relation between that and “liberalism dying”. Sometimes those on the right want the biggest government bailouts for banks and other major corporations.
Every budgetary projection issued by the Republicans over the past decade has assumed that the Bush tax cuts would not be extended. If they are extended, that’s the opposite of what the Republicans said they wanted, so how’s it a victory for them?
It is not the end of leftism. For starters, there are places on earth other than Europe and the United States (your comment about Cuba has already been dissected by others); look at a map if you don’t believe me.
I think that we in the USA have realized that the “Great Society” was a disaster. We spent trillions on public housing…only to see them turn into slums. We poured money into “education” only to see educational standards decline. We launched all kinds of nutrition programs-and now obesity is the largest public health problem.
Welfare liberalism has not solved social problems-it has contributed to them.
Yeah, we should go back to the good old days when illiteracy was rampant and people starved to death.
Well, that was cheaper.
Glad to see Patriotic Americans are staging massive electoral revolts in America these days, rather than Iran or Nicaragua.
Is “thing Mr Smashy said” a new definition of “expression”?
Maybe I’m ignorant, but I can’t think of a single civilization (or even just a large group of people) for which this is true. Especially since capitalism and socialism as ideas are only a few hundred years old at most, and much younger in practice.
Yeah, after all there were no poor people or slums before there was public housing.
Meanwhile, maybe the OP could explain what he means when he says (I’m sort of interpreting here) ‘patriotic’ Americans only vote republican. Unless he’s got a really good explanation for this inflammatory statement, it’s gonna be pretty hard to take anything else he says seriously.