Rendezvous With Oblivion

  THOMAS FRANK

Published: September 1, 2006

Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-left's inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation's necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut. But don't expect liberal leaders in Washington to use those things. They are "New Democrats" now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian stemwinder against "economic royalists."

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer -- that is, when they're not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos -- is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or re-educate ourselves so we will fit in better next time.

This last point was a priority for the Clinton administration. But in "The Disposable American," a disturbing history of job security, Louis Uchitelle points out that the New Democrats' emphasis on retraining (as opposed to broader solutions that Old Democrats used to favor) is merely a kinder version of the 19th-century view of unemployment, in which economic dislocation always boils down to the fitness of the unemployed person himself.

[snip]

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won't on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers.

[snip]

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade.

Of course, this isn't going to happen, especially if liberals keep falling for the fearmongering "If you don't vote for our worthless asses the REPUBLICANS will keep doing what we're gonna end up doing anyway, only in a more nice way". If people vote for Hillary et al, they're helping the right. PERIOD.

The current membership of the Democratic Party is largely beyond hope, beyond reason, beyond decency.

note: I snipped out a couple of good paragraphs so the copyright nazis wouldn't go after BMT.

"Whenever a Voice of Moderation addresses liberals, its sole purpose is to stomp out any real sign of life." - James Wolcott