Keeping the pilot light on

 

 

Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.

The Left’s objective is still at a low ebb. Liberalism gets its spirit from equality and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.

In the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.

Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes.  All of them good. But there was no center.

Ten years ago, the left reached crisis point.

It’s the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth.

Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich.

Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Look around – commercials even dominate left-wing blogs.

And in Congress, too. Too often, Democrats sit quietly, waiting for the lobbyists to call.

Sold out.

This President is new. But which way to turn?

No fallen flag to grab up. Well what have Democrats been doing?

In Congress, the first order of business is the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the previous administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those have the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage.  Fixing health care.  Job by necessary  job.  But that is not ‘forward.’

It looks like there is no unified ‘forward.’

The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.

Of course there’s leftist commentators, left wing editors. But no coherent new theory, to unify.

Except here.

Only on this blog can you read whether exploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracy itself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here.

Opinion is power.

But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.

Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.

Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.