Think you’re liberal?
Try this.
On one side of a city there are people so wealthy that after big parties, they are throwing out meat. On the other side there are people so poor, they cannot afford to buy meat. Is this a moral problem?
–This question is a litmus test. It is attributed to John Rawls, liberal theorist from the 1970s.
Free market and laissez faire conservatives see no problem – they think it’s “in the nature of things” that some people have more than they know what to do with, while others live with scarcity. For them, the inequality is simply not an issue.
Next, there are people who say it’s a technical problem of not enough food being grown to keep everybody in abundance, not a moral problem.
But liberals see it differently. Liberals feel there is something wrong with a system (city, nation) which in total, contains enough food for everybody, but not everyone is able to get it. The situation is unjust.
Liberalism – the left – rests on moral judgments. A prime moral is justice.
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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 vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equity, justice, 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.
During 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 is no center.
The left reached another crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s partly 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. Lefties worry about their credit score and worry about security.
Sold out.
This President has abandoned any serious atteempts at facing up to the banks. It looks like loss of nerve.
Which way to turn?
After Obama took the presidency, the first order of business was the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the Bush administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those had the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But all that is not ‘forward.’
It’s partly that Liberals have lost their ‘forward.’ This is as deep a crisis as our submission to Wall Street. It is a collective loss of nerve.
There’s no fallen flag to grab up in the Liberal movement because there is no longer any flag.
Congress has no unified ‘forward.’ The American people have no unified forward. Once, we had the Occupy Movement. It suffered from lack of any forward agenda, and caved to police action. So now liberals talk about their frightening college debts or get fearful about retirement. Since we have no more effective restriction on exorbitant interest rates, they sap anybody’s courage.
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
There’s few leftist commentators, talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whetherexploitation 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 democracyitself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here andhere.
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.
[Comments: click on ‘Keeping the pilot light on’ in the Header, or in Pages, below]
How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, dealt out his thrashings on t.v.
Right wing commentators run an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good, maybe showing a tolerant sense of humor, should be enough to prevail.
It is not, and the Left has no real idea how to push back. So the Left, with its natural compassion, its collective action, its trust, its usury laws, are all being put through the meat grinder.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
– here’swhy.
Left Blog
Left Blog 
Well the answer to that question is real simple if you are a libber-al. Why do those people have so much that they can throw valuable stuff away?? Plutocracy is why. The dumbshit question about whether we live in a democracy or republic is reichwing propaganda. We live in neither. We live in a plutocracy where the rich buy the politicians they want and the politicians do what helps the plutocrats. This has been going on for the at least the entire 20th century, but voters don’t seem to care.
Oh yes, occasionally the voters can make a difference, but not nearly as often as the plutocrats. Look at the second half of the 20th century. We had genius democrats, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton who could do very little to change things, and then we had dumbshit Rushpublicans like Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the Bushes who only made things worse.
So the average asshole probably says, “Hey, let them starve”. and then the average libber-al tries some patch work effort to relieve a little bit of hunger and poverty.
The rich do not make all that money just because of our wonderful free enterprise system, they make it because the government they control helps them. And they can use the money to spread FEAR, HATE, IGNORANCE, and GREED into rednecks, old farts (Hell, I’m 65) and other dumbshits who will vote for their agenda instead of that of the libber-al commies.
The people on one side are tossing out good food, and the people on the other side are starving because the people are voting for FEAR, HATE, IGNORANCE, and GREED instead of common sense and good will.
I enjoy this site, it is worth me coming back
Really like this site, would you mind if I link to it from my blog?
One comedian put it best–“one party is for the rich and admits it while the other party if for the rich and denies it” Pretty good observation! A century ago Alexander Berkman made the observation that in a dictatorship or monarchy the enemy is clearly defined and exposed for everyone to see while in a so called ‘democracy’ the people are deceived into believing they actually have choices and political power.
whats the point of the is America a demorcracy or republic question? Why not make is simple, do you think you have any real say in the way your country is run?