By going back to the basic principles of liberalism, Reitan writes, that can be remedied.
“Liberals are nationalists, in that they know the future is tied up with the welfare of their country. They are internationalists because the U.S. exists in a globalized world.
“They want pay-as-you-go budgets, and taxes that fall heaviest on those who have benefited most from America. They believe in free enterprise, but they know capitalism must be supported by investment in public facilities... that cannot be provided by private enterprise, and regulated for its own good as well as the good of the country,” he says.
While supporting a strong but “relevant” defence force, says Reitan — a World War II vet who was wounded in action — “liberals deplore militarism and advocate caution and compassion in the use of military force.”
One of the main problems for liberals, Reitan says in a phone interview, is the division of the middle class that was the standard-bearer of liberal values.
“The emphasis has to be on national unity. If the middle class is fragmented by the kind of irrelevant issues that are taken up by politicians, the centre doesn’t hold, and the cacophony of voices is beating at our ears. Things are getting out of hand.”
Cultural critic and author Henry Giroux of McMaster University, agrees. “The right needs diversionary tactics to avert the gaze of the American people from the gross lies, incompetence and corruption that now characterize the Bush regime’s disastrous domestic and foreign policies,” he argues.
“Liberalism has become the new whipping boy, proving an easy target in which dissent is equated with treason ... Calling someone a liberal today is not too different from calling someone a communist in the ’50s, which is indicative of how far politics has moved to the right.”
Keevan Morgan, a Chicago lawyer and author of Why You Are a Liberal — Or Should Be, says that the divisiveness of the Bush administration has badly affected liberals, and put them on the wrong foot when it comes time to argue their case.
“Liberalism is a dirty word, but it’s undeserved,” he says in a phone interview. “People who run for office under the liberal banner don’t know how to defend their cause. They’re playing defence while the Republicans are defining the debate. Conservatives don’t believe in a united country, and their view is that government is the enemy. If you don’t have a country in which everyone has a stake in the enterprise, you’re going to create civil strife.”
And what liberals should be reminding people is that strong central government is their best defender against inequality, something that is left out of the debate, even while the gap between rich and poor grows.
“In this country our last protector may be the essence of liberalism (embodied in) the state. That is how our country grew up and existed. If liberals remembered where they came from, they might know where to take the country.”
Liberals have problems not only in finding an identity, but expressing one, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor in University of California Berkeley’s School of Information — and author of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.
The Democratic Party that is the bastion of liberalism has “a chronic problem of telling a coherent story about itself, right down to an inability to get its adverbs and subjects to agree,” wrote Nunberg in the Los Angeles Times. “Until Democrats can spell out a more explicit and compelling vision for America, it isn’t clear how the party can restore its faded lustre.”
The answer, says Nunberg, is finding a new political language that speaks of “decency” and “fairness” instead of using language that “embodies the world view of the right.”
Even to speak of values smacks of right wing rhetoric, Nunberg says: “Since the Nixon-Agnew years, `values’ has worked for conservatives because, through disciplined insistence, they’ve made it the label for a whole file of narratives about liberal arrogance, declining patriotism and moral decay,” he says.
As the battle for the soul of liberalism continues, neither side appears closer to victory. Meanwhile, says Beinart, the Republican right is “demoralized” while liberal critics of the Iraq war are “energized and vocal.”
But energy alone won’t win the day. “Being against Bush isn’t a policy. His name isn’t on the ballot now. The question becomes: `What is the story we have to tell to the post 9/11 world?’ And how are we as liberals going to make the world better?” |
楼主: 参m
狗仔卡
发表于 2006-7-3 02:03:58
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