The American Left vs. the American People?

Great Debates
61

The ironic thing is that it could in fact be argued that liberals have actually saved capitalism from itself. I.e., it is only through the reforms of liberals which have smoothed out the rough edges of laissez-faire capitalism that the rise of more radical socialist ideas have been squelched.

By the way, I was just curious: Those of you who seem to think this elitism is such a problem endemic to liberals, how does this idea jive with the facts that this current administration has tried to reduce the public’s access to information, e.g., by fighting toth-and-nail against releasing information on who Cheney et al. met with when devising the energy policy and by Ashcroft’s directive on Freedom of Information Act requests which, roughly speaking, changed it from the Reno days when the directive was that there was a presumption of “when in doubt release” to a policy of “when in doubt withhold.” And, then there is the classification of all of the info on the missile defense tests which was not classified under Clinton. And, then there is all the distortion and suppression of science that we have discussed in another current thread.

Personally, I find this attempt to suppress and distort important information in the public policy process to be much more elitist, and in a much more sinister and dangerous way, than any of the examples mentioned by those attacking liberals in this thread. Even if some liberals sometimes disdainfully imply that the common people are ignorant about what is going on, that is much less elitist than basically trying to work to keep people ignorant by limiting their access to information!

62

Read my sentence again. This time notice that I am not complaining that Beagle doesn’t agree but that he doesn’t understand. Also notice that I didn’t imply that he just wasn’t smart enough to understand but that his lack of comprehension was due the limits of his intelligence and curiosity. IOW- maybe he, and others like him, don’t understand because they aren’t mentally up to the task or maybe they just don’t care enough to bother trying.

Read that over a few times to be sure you get it. Now try to make a response without sticking your foot in your mouth.

I don’t know what kind of ivory tower fantasies you are having but don’t try to paint me as out of touch with poor working Midwesterners. I grew up in rural upstate Michigan in a house with little insulation, wood heat, a pump out front and an outhouse in the back. Try that on a winter night. My mother was a secretary who drove a beat up VW Bug with only one front seat to work and my dad, after he lost his tool-and-die job in the city, was unemployed. He sold firewood off of the back of an old pickup without plates or insurance and put meat on the table with his rifle and spear. We couldn’t even afford to move in alone and had to share the place with another family for years. Now I live in western PA where I work in a chain resturant for $2.83 an hour plus tips. I understand working class because I am working class.

Now then, by all means tell us exactly what is elitist about noticing that when someone misunderstands it must either be too complex for them to grasp or they just ain’t trying. You too are invited to experiment with opening your mouth without sticking your foot in it.

63

elucidator:
Actually, yes, I do think that. As well, when James Carville sneers and says “I don’t need a damn tax cut, I got bucks out my coon-ass wazoo!”, I believe him too. Some peope do, in truth, have a concept of “enough, already!”

I hear this kind of thing all the time, im not sure about the US, but here in the UK you can pay more tax if you want, your tax bill is the minimum legal amount of tax you are required to pay. I once asked a Tax ofiicer that if an individual wished to pay more tax than was owed, would it be accepted, and yes it would. So if these very wealthy wished to give more they can, also it amazes me how many of these people who talk about paying more, or having no more tax cuts, employ vast armies of lawers and accountants to prevent that very thing.

64

the_bean: I don’t think an existentialist argument works real well for taxation. It is a sort of “we’re all in this together thing.” My extra few hundred bucks isn’t going to make a huge difference…It is only when that is multiplied by millions of people that it becomes an amount of money that can be useful for funding programs that I believe in or reducing the deficit or reducing taxes on those who are most in need of tax relief.

What we are really saying when we say “people like me should pay more taxes” (“more” being relative to what we pay following the Bush tax cuts) is that we think that society would be better served if all people in a similar position had a higher tax burden with a resultant increase in government revenues that can be used for the variety of purposes that I noted above.

Not all societal decisions can or should be made on the individual level despite the notion of Market Fundamentalists. How we cooperatively bear the burden of the programs we set up through government is one of those decisions.

65

What do we mean by “elitism,” anyway? The OP accuses some American leftists of being “elitists” because they seem to think they know what’s best for the poor and working classes; they have the Truth, the inside Straight Dope, which the masses are not really equipped to understand. (And maybe, just maybe, they’re right!) That’s one kind of elitism. The Progressive/technocratic idea that government should be a business for specialized professionals, rather than randomly selected common citizens as in the Jacksonian ideal, is another form of elitism. Both are based on the idea that if some kind of elite is in charge things will go better for everybody, even those outside the elite. And this kind of elitism is indeed defensible. (I certainly wouldn’t want to see modern public offices and government jobs filled by the spoils system as they were in Jackson’s day!) One could even make a case (not a very good one, but a case) for the general social value of hereditary aristocracy. From Intellectuals by Paul Johnson (Harper & Collins, 1988), Chapter 13:

A pretty picture, looked at in a certain light. But there is a very different and much older kind of elitism. The kind represented by John C. Calhoun, who defended slavery on the grounds that every civilization must be based on “a mudsill of brute labor.” The kind of elitism that was unthinkingly espoused by practically all upper-class Brits until well into the 20th Century – the assumption that they were the real “nation,” the only kind of people who really mattered, the only kind that were truly ends-in-themselves – and that everybody lower down the social scale was unimportant and expendable. As Bertrand Russell put it in his classic book Power, “Whatever your politics might be, I hold there can be no justification for an aristocratic ethic – for saying that these few are to enjoy the good things, and the others merely to minister to them. Of course, aristocracies have always behaved in a way that no other ethic could justify.” And as an English earl, Russell should know.

In modern American politics, the aristocratic ethic is the political viewpoint that Dare Not Speak Its Name – but that doesn’t mean a lot of our ruling class don’t subscribe to it, consciously or unconsciously. And American leftists, in general, cannot honestly be accused of that form of elitism.

66

What are you saying, they might be right? Can’t you see the evidence to the contrary right under your nose? We can think for ourselves, thank you very much.

67

I said “maybe,” 2sense. Please do try to keep a grip on your sense of humor.

68

Ok, I’m just a dumb conservative here…how are “not smart enough” and having “…limit[ed] intelligence”/ “Not mentally up to the task” different?

69

got a great deal more than my self-proving detractor.

If you think I don’t know something about “social justice” feel free to point it out.

I’ll just keep proving my point with scholarly articles.

The left relies on silencing reasonable opposition. From Stalin, through Che, until Castro, Saddam, and their many leftist apologists – their MO never changes.

  1. Educate yourself (“re-education”).
  2. Not good enough. bang

Withdrawl from Vietnam, the absolute pinnacle of leftist protest, something Kerry supports today, is one of MANY examples of the left just missing the mark by about 4 million casualties and refugees. That’s par for their course. The American left didn’t support WWII until Germany invaded Stalin’s Soviet Union.

70

I will, thanks. Generally I find that easier to do when given an indication that jabs are offered in jest. When another isn’t in on the joke the suggestion that they may be mentally deficient is hardly amusing. I certainly didn’t intend it that way when I suggested it to Beagle.

And that is the difference, elfkin477. I suggested rather than stating. I didn’t say he was too dumb but rather that either he was too dumb or he wasn’t paying attention. The idea is to take the argument to him, to put him on the defensive and make him deny he is dumb and show he has been paying attention. It’s a confrontational tactic but not directly insulting. That it failed just shows that he is more interested in smearing others than taking responsibility for his own words. As far as I’m concerned that tells you all you need to know about Beagle.

71

Just a few things for the Lefties to consider.

When I was a kid, NO self-respecting blue-collar Irish or Italian New Yorker would ever have dreamed of voting Republican. Franklin Roosevelt was a deity in my neighborhood, and people still reviled Herbert Hoover as if he’d been in the WHite House only yesterday. Back in the 1960’s, the very word “Republican” wasn’t in my grandfather’s vocabulary. To him, there were “Democrats” and “Republicanbastards” (one word). Blue collar, urban, ethnic Caucasians were the backbone of the Democratic Party until fairly recently. If you’d told such folks back in 1968 “Before long, you’ll be voting Republican more often than not,” they’d have scoffed at the suggestion.

And, incidentally, the same was true here in the South. Rednecks used to vote Democratic reflexively.

So, you on the Left, how did you lose your core constituency? How did you lose people who always voted a straight Democratic ticket, and (at some level) still WANT to?

I don’t expect I’ll get any thoughtful, rational, articulate replies. I expect I’ll hear a lot of self-righteous, vile, venomous nonsense about the GOP’s evil propaganda machine. And frankly, that’ll be fine with me. The longer the Left chooses to think that way, the longer we Pubbies will continue to win elections.

But for your own sake, you might want to ask yourself, “Where did we screw up? How did we alienate our most loyal voters? How could we have been so stupid?”

But I don’t expect any of you will.

72

Simple enough. They lie better than we do, and they have more money to do it with.

73

astorian: *And, incidentally, the same was true here in the South. Rednecks used to vote Democratic reflexively.

So, you on the Left, how did you lose your core constituency? How did you lose people who always voted a straight Democratic ticket, and (at some level) still WANT to?*

Well, particularly in the South, a good deal of it was the anti-civil-rights backlash. Since the late nineteenth century, most Southern Democrats had been firmly in the pro-segregation camp. When the Democratic Party as a whole shifted to a racial-equality stance in the 1960’s, a lot of segregationists who had liked the Democrats’ support for the working class but just couldn’t stomach the civil rights platform stopped being Democrats.

See Earl and Merle Black’s The Rise of Southern Republicans for a good description of this phenomenon and other, economic influences that have made the South much more Republican since the 1960’s.

Outside the South, probably one of the biggest factors in the shrinking of working-class Democrats was a more generalized reaction against social liberalism including women’s liberation, the counterculture, etc. Beginning around 1980 we saw the sharp rise of what’s now called the “Religious Right”, politicized conservative Christianity, and the phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats”, working-class voters (largely male) who had traditionally voted Democratic but broke with their party affiliation because they preferred Reagan’s social conservatism.

In a nutshell, then: A lot of former Democratic “core constituents”, when their party realigned with more socially liberal policies in the 1960’s and 70’s, felt that the Democratic support for the working class was not as important as what they saw as its abandonment of socially conservative values. So they ended up voting Republican, often in defiance of their own economic interests, whether they realized it or not.

Now that racial and gender equality are no longer seen as such dangerously liberal ideas, and the working class is feeling some of the negative effects of Republican pro-business policies, we will probably see more of these voters shifting back to the Democrats. Of course, the more socially radical the Democratic Party appears to be, the more hesitant such voters will continue to be about returning to it. This is why many Republicans are anxious to associate Democrats with the issue of gay rights, which seems as threatening and radical to most social conservatives today as civil rights for blacks did forty years ago.

74

Beagle: The left relies on silencing reasonable opposition. From Stalin, through Che, until Castro, Saddam, and their many leftist apologists – their MO never changes.

As EC said, “One of the most interesting points raised on this thread and elsewhere on the SDMB to my mind, is the consistent pattern that conservative posters have of mistaking liberals for socialists.”

I think this indicates how right-wing America’s politics are in general, compared to the rest of the world, when it is so frequently imagined that we can usefully lump Stalinists and their ilk together with modern US liberals and the Democratic Party, and speak of them all as one monolithic “left”. This is like saying that everyone from Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Linc Chafee through George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Richard Perle, Pat Buchanan, and the Christian Reconstructionists can be lumped together to represent a single monolithic “right”.

75

What he said.

And the biggest lie of all is the “liberal media” bogeyman, which allows the GOP to (a) denounce anything that they disagree with as “liberal bias,” while simultaneously (b) engaging in partisan bias of their own.

76

“There is NOTHING to be learned here. In fact, I want you to write down everything we did, so that if this ever happens again, we can do everything exactly the same, and hope we get luckier this time.”

                                       -Duckman (and rjung and elucidator)

Well, I was wrong. I got ONE thoughtful reply. Most of what Kimstu said is unexceptionable.

But luckily for the GOP, rjung and elucidator are more typical of the liberal mindset. They’re utterly incapable of self-criticism or honest self-analysis. They’ve abandoned the voters they need most. Indeed, they do everything possible to drive away the people who made the New Deal coalition possible… and then insist that THEY couldn’t have made any mistakes, that the only possible explanation is the sinister GOP proaganda machine.

Not that I object, mind you. I don’t really WANT the Dems to wise up and face reality! The longer people who think like rjung and elucidator control the Democratic party, the better for us Pubbies!

77

astorian: *Well, I was wrong. I got ONE thoughtful reply. Most of what Kimstu said is unexceptionable.

But luckily for the GOP, rjung and elucidator are more typical of the liberal mindset. *

Right astorian, and I put sugar on my porridge too. :rolleyes:

C’mon. I mean, thanks for the compliment and all, but this is a classic True Scotsman argument: you ask for critical analyses of the loss of Democratic voters to demonstrate that liberals are more than just mindless GOP-bashers, you get such an analysis from a liberal, and then you respond that it doesn’t count because typical liberals are just mindless GOP-bashers. Yup, if you just redefine the category enough, everything you say about the category will be true; that’s the beauty of the True Scotsman argument.

*Not that I object, mind you. I don’t really WANT the Dems to wise up and face reality! *

If I too were more concerned about partisan one-upmanship than about getting out the Straight Dope, I would just let you go on believing that. However, in the interests of truth I have to inform you that there are in fact lots of liberal analyses of Democratic decline that criticize specific weaknesses of the Democratic party and of American liberalism. Hell, this very thread was started to discuss one such analysis! Another classic discussion of the Democrats in the context of political party decline in general is this 1998 article in the liberal American Prospect, which references several more detailed sources.

Moreover, voter confidence in many respects does appear to be shifting back to the Democrats, according to a number of recent polls:

I try to remember what George Eliot said about prophecy (namely, that of all forms of mistake it’s the most gratuitous) and not make particular predictions from such ephemeral data. But I think it’s fair to conclude that your “dream scenario” of liberals doing nothing but gnash their teeth over evil Republican propaganda while the GOP continues on its Teflon course is more fantasy than reality.

78

Philosophy and politics are as far apart as could be. Although, one could write a hell of a treatise on “The Philosophy of Politics.”

Collectivism leading to propaganda, poverty, starvation, intellectual oppression, political oppression, and mass murder is something that might be studied empirically.

Socialism, anti-Americanism, government propaganda as news, and modern genocide are some of my favorite subjects to learn about. Mostly to show the relationships, but also to cut them off at the pass.

In the process, I’ve bookmarked Z-Mag, The Nation, Counterpunch, and Democratic Underground – just to name a few. Unlike a leftist, I assume I must win the war of ideas through persuasion, not at the point of a gun.

That’s the thing about being a “classical liberal” – nobody even knows what it means any more. One hint, we believe in the free exchange of ideas. I could actually listen to a Communist without shouting him down, or wishing to silence him. I wish I could say the same for college students and moderates.

Of course, those that can’t logically deal with opposing viewpoints are “left” with few options.

I’ve now posted three articles on “social justice.” Each one takes a slightly different approach to understanding Orwellian renaming of collectivism and the propaganda used to push it (quite successfully) to those educated just high enough to read. Once a person has read some of the classics: Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Jefferson, Rousseau, Jean-Francois Revel, Hayek, etc. – Marxism, collectivism (social justice) just sounds stupid.

If, OTOH, you’re limited to Jose Bove, L’Humanite, Chomsky, and Karl Marx, well, you’re basically clueless about the state of the art in political science.

It’s all just authoritarianism, collectivism, and government force in a brand new, easy-to-open package.

Importantly, I’d like to point out that collectivism is also practiced by the so-called “conservative” religious right. The difference is in the policy areas and in the death toll as a result (much smaller in recent years). I’m ignoring pre-Reformation. Christians attempt to abuse the powers of government to regulate social areas. OTOH, even their best laid plans would amount to much less theocracy the average modern Islamic government already practices.

Still, as important as degree is, the FMA sucks. The 10th Amendment needs no more dirt shoveled on its grave.

79

It would be good, indeed, to have an honest dialogue as regards “liberal” and “conservative” political views. A post that relies primarily on slandering one’s opponents is not an effort in that directions, but merely a public preening of one’s own extremism.

“…Unlike a leftist, I assume I must win the war of ideas through persuasion, not at the point of a gun…”

What utter rot, sir. Baseless slander masquerading as argument.

80

Well, showing ignorance on historical matters can make one sound like someone willing to mislead everybody.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/abe-brigade.html

The facts were more complex, but it is misleading (and a lie in the end) to say “the left” (that implies they were a single block) did not support WWII. What is clear is that right before WWII, many of them were smart enough to see what Hitler was up to in the Spanish civil war. AFAICR historians treat that civil war as the preamble of WWII and the left in America saw what Hitler was all about, even before the American government figured that out. Going even to the point of risking their lives for the cause. Read some Hemingway for more info Beagle.

After the Hitler-Stalin pact, it is true that a good number of people in the left agreed to leave Germany alone, but the ones that participated in the fight against Franco never agreed with that position.
Regarding Castro and others, you must have ignored many posts from me and many others typed before in other threads: we don’t agree with Castro or those dictators, you may think your implications of a MO are not an insult, but they are.

And speaking of Vietnam: I do believe none of us would be having this conversation now if we had followed the war mongers then, because I do think an attempt to reach total victory in Vietnam would have meant an escalation to Nuclear war. Then, I guess, if you were coming from those days, you would today be like the people in that political cartoon of the day that showed two poor survivors in the middle of a destroyed city in America, near the ambers of a dying fire in the dead of winter, and one telling the other: “I heard a rumor we won!”

Like the documentary “The Fog of war” showed, it is hard to eventually learn that criticizing bad policy does not mean the opposition automatically supports the enemy. Many have learned that lesson. Some, however, want to pretend there was no lesson to begin with, which is sad.