Haiku Politics

Liberal blogger Michael Stickings wrote this posting, which is an unapologetic defense of liberalism and an argument that liberals need to reverse the recent rightward pull of the center of political gravity and move it back leftward.

He makes a valid point about the fact that the political center of gravity has shifted rightward in American politics over recent years. But where I disagree with him is that I believe that this rightward pull is due to the inherent failings of liberalism itself. I also strongly disagree with his praise for some of the leading political hacks of the Democratic Party as representing any kind of political salvation for this country.

I wrote the following as a comment in that blog entry:

There is no question that the center of gravity in American politics has been pulled rightward over the last 35 years or so, and as a result, the definition of "liberal" has also been pulled rightward. That is why Nixon, lying scumbag warmonger that he was, is sometimes refered to as the "last liberal President"--because after his presidency, in which we saw the creation of the EPA, OSHA, and the Clean Air Act, and in which Nixon once proposed a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, the "liberals" in Washington moved ever rightward, to the point where Al Gore in 2000 was essentially farther to the right than Nixon was in 1970.

This is one of several of the problems with modern liberalism. Liberals turn to their heroes, various Democrats like Al Gore or Howard Dean, whose ideology would historically not have been considered particularly left of center. They pin their hopes on a supposedly "progressive" ideology that isn't particularly progressive and a political party like the Democrats that is intensely tied to corporate interests and US imperialism abroad.

As I see it, liberalism was stillborn, and its failures have only come to fruition in recent years, because it didn't really know what it wanted to be. It was so afraid of socialism, it distanced itself from radical solutions to the serious problems of the capitalist system, that one could argue that it was as much a reaction to radicalism and socialism as it was to conservatism. Liberals like Hubert Humphrey in the 1940s purged the Democratic Farmer-Labor party of radicals and socialists, thus insuring that the Democratic Party would not be a party that dared to threaten corporate interests. In fact, the very use of the word "liberal" in our nation's political discourse for its so-called left wing is telling--in American politics, no mainstream politician dares uses a word like "socialist" or even "social democrat". It is this fear of the left that inevitably led liberalism to slide rightward over the years.

I think there are other fundamental problems with liberalism. As I wrote in my blog enter "Corporate Consolidation and the Failure of American Liberalism", liberalism never really offered a successful or meaningful challenge to corporate power, nor did it ever, with its attachment to market economics, come up with any way of taming the evils of capitalism that would ever work--and this is essentially because the evils of capitalism cannot be tamed without replacing the system with something better. Liberals, afraid of radicalism, are unwilling to seek radical solutions, and instead pay allegiance to the economic and political system that creates the very evils that liberals say they want to address.

In this modern era of globalization and neoliberalism, American liberalism is at a loss to really cope with modern international capitalism. Ultimately, liberalism has proved itself to be a failed ideology.

Possibly the most heartening thing I have seen in all of this is the possiblity that some liberals are starting to see the light. For example, consider a recent article in the liberal magazine Nation, in which Ronald Aronson said, "It's time to break a taboo and place the word "socialism" across the top of the page in a major American progressive magazine. Time for the left to stop repressing the side of ourselves that the right finds most objectionable. Until we thumb our noses at the Democratic pols who have been calling the shots and reassert the very ideas they say are unthinkable, we will keep stumbling around in the dark corners of American politics, wondering how we lost our souls--and how to find them again."

As I see it, failures of liberalism could not be plainer than they are now. The solution to our problems lies not in a return to liberalism, but a birth of radicalism.

Posted by The Haikuist on Thursday, April 06, 2006 at 1:37 PM | Permalink