"Apocalypse Now", Jill Greenberg

The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There’s just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds – it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs. No child would bring home a wounded liberal and ask to keep it as a pet. More likely he would step on it, or maybe tie it to a bottle-rocket and shoot it over the railroad tracks.

The word has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I’m not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do – iconoclastic columnists and journalists who’ve had bylines in places like The Nation – they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.

“Fuck that,” responded one, when I asked if he wanted to be quoted in this piece. “I’d rather talk about my genital warts. I’d rather show you pictures of my genital warts, as a matter of fact.”

“Ugh. Not sure I want to go there,” read one e-mail.

“I really wish I wasn’t associated with the left,” sighed a third.

When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that’s a bad sign, and it’s worth asking what the reasons are.

A lot of it, surely, has to do with the relentless abuse liberalism takes in the right-wing media, on Fox and afternoon radio, and amid the Townhall.com network of newspaper invective-hurlers. The same dynamic that makes the junior high school kid fear the word “fag” surely has many of us frightened of the word “liberal.” Mike Savage says liberalism is a mental disorder, Sean Hannity equates liberals with terrorists, Ann Coulter says that “liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole.” These people have a broad, monolithic audience whose impassioned opinions are increasingly entrenched. In the pseudo-Orwellian political landscape that is modern America, to self-identify as a liberal is almost tantamount to thoughtcrime, a dangerous admission that carries with it the very real risk of instantly and permanently alienating a good half of the population, in particular most of middle America. That reason alone makes it, in a way, wrong and cowardly to abandon liberalism and liberals. If Ann Coulter wants to call all of us fags, well, then, fine, I’m a fag. For the sake of that fight, I’ll stay a liberal till the end of time. But between you and me, between all of us on that side of things, liberalism needs to be fixed.

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one of the few American politicians in history to have survived publicly admitting to being a socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic schism is a fundamental problem for the American political opposition.

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the ‘American left,’” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important).

“But you’re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government – and How We Can Take it Back, is a guy who frequently appears on television news programs defending the “left” in TV’s typical Crossfire-style left-right rock-‘em-sock-‘em format. Like a lot of people who make their living in this world, he’s sometimes frustrated with the lack of discipline and purpose in American liberalism. And like Sanders, he worries that there is a wide chasm between the people who speak for the left and sponsor left-leaning political organizations, and the actual people they supposedly represent.

“Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement,” he says. “You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem.”

Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. This basically regressive electoral formula has been a staple of the Democratic Party ever since the Walter Mondale fiasco in the mid-eighties prompted a few shrewd Washington insiders to create the notorious “pro-business” political formula of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to end the party’s dependence upon labor money by announcing a new willingness to sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street. Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.

Within a decade, the process was automatic – Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna.

But money and campaign contributions aren’t the only reason “liberal“ politicians screw their voters.

“It’s also a cultural thing,” Sanders says. “A lot of these folks really don’t have a lot of contact with working-class people. They’re not comfortable with working-class people. They’re more comfortable with environmentalists, with well-educated people. And it’s their issues that matter to them.”

This is another dirty little secret of the left – the fact that, at least when it comes to per-capita income, those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being “elitists” are actually true. According to a 2004 Pew report, Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. They’re also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.

The same is true of the political media in Washington – not just the few journalists on the left, but all of the media. Reporters in Washington of both the liberal and conservative variety tend mostly to be interested in issues that they themselves care about, and as a result they end up defining the political landscape in terms of orthodoxies that make sense to them.

“With the media, it’s like, ‘Are you pro-choice? Yes? Then you’re a liberal.’ It’s bullshit,” scoffs Sanders. The senator went on to point out that a recent Senate hearing on veterans’ issues attracted over 500 angry war veterans – and no reporters. “It’s just not their thing,” he sighs.

Progressive politicians in Washington frequently complain that the political mainstream’s abandonment of working-class issues opens the door for Republicans to seize the ignored middle-American electorate, mainly by scaring them with bugaboo images of marrying queers, godless commie academics, dirty bearded eco-terrorists, and so on.

To them, the essentially patrician structure of the political left is mostly a logistical political problem, one that can theoretically be solved, as Sanders solved it in his state, by shunning corporate campaign donors, listening to voters again, and re-emphasizing working-class issues.

But having rich college grads acting as the political representatives of the working class isn’t just bad politics. It’s also silly. And there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.

What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word “oppression” escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using the word “Amerika.” Ebonics, Fanetiks, and other such insane institutional manifestations of white guilt. Combat berets. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees consumed at leisure in between conversational comparisons of America to Nazi Germany.

We all know where this stuff comes from. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

Then there’s the tone problem. A hell of a lot of what the left does these days is tediously lecture middle America about how wrong it is, loudly snorting at a stubbornly unchanging litany of Republican villains. There’s a weirdly indulgent tone to all of this Bush-bashing that goes on in lefty media, a tone that’s not only annoyingly predictable in its pervasiveness, but a turnoff to people who might have tuned in to that channel in search of something else.

“I share the position of a lot of those people, and some of that feel-good Bush-bashing is okay, I guess, but also – can I get some information here?” says Christian Parenti, a journalist who frequently writes for The Nation. “I think just reporting the facts can be enormously empowering, but there’s not enough of that. That moralistic thing . . . I think it’s something that’s built deep into the culture, not just on the left but everywhere.”

But to me the biggest problem with American liberalism is that it hasn’t found a new legend for itself, one to replace the old one, which is more and more often no longer relevant. I’ve got no problem with long hair and weed and kids playing “Imagine” on acoustic guitars at peace marches. But we often make the mistake of thinking that the “revolution” of the sixties is something that rightly should continue on to today.

While it’s true that we’re still fighting against unjust wars and that there’s unfinished business on the fronts of women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental preservation, there’s no generational battle left for America’s rich kids to fight. In the sixties, college kids had to fight for their right to refuse to become bankers, soldiers, plastics executives or whatever other types of dreary establishment lifestyles their parents were demanding for them. And because they had to fight that fight, the interests of white college kids were briefly and felicitously aligned with the blacks and the migrant farm workers and the South Vietnamese, who were also victims of the same dug-in, inflexible political establishment. Long hair, tie-dye and the raised black fist all had the same general message – screw the establishment. It was a sort of Marxian perfect storm where even the children of the bourgeoisie could semi-realistically imagine themselves engaged in a class struggle.

But American college types don’t have to fight for shit anymore. Remember the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill album? Remember that song “Fight for Your Right to Party”? Well, people, that song was a joke. So was “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “And the Cradle Will Rock.” The only thing American college kids have left to fight for are the royalties for their myriad appearances in Girls Gone Wild videos. Which is why they look ridiculous parading around at peace protests in the guise of hapless victims and subjects of the Amerikan neo-Reich. Rich liberals protesting the establishment is absurd because they are the establishment; they’re just too embarrassed to admit it.

When they start embracing their position of privilege and taking responsibility for the power they already have – striving to be the leaders of society they actually are, instead of playing at being aggrieved subjects – they’ll come across as wise and patriotic citizens, not like the terminally adolescent buffoons trapped in a corny sixties daydream they often seem to be now. They’ll stop bringing puppets to marches and, more importantly, they’ll start doing more than march.

That, in sum, is why I don’t call myself a liberal. To me the word “liberalism” describes an era whose time is past, a time when a liberal was defined more by who he was fighting against – the Man – than what he was fighting for. A liberal wielding power is always going to seem a bit strange because a liberal always imagines himself in an intrepid fight against power, not holding it. I therefore prefer the word “progressive,” which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations. To me a progressive is not fighting Mom and Dad, Nixon, Bush or really any people at all, but things – political corruption, commercialism, pollution, etc. It doesn’t have that same Marxian us-versus-them connotation that liberalism still has, sometimes ridiculously. It’s about goals, not people.

In a few years it will be half a century since the 1960s began. The Baby-Boomer generation that shaped modern liberalism will soon be moving on to the nursing home, many of its battles – for civil, gay, immigrant and women’s rights, for workplace protections, and against the Vietnam war and Richard Nixon – already won. They did a lot of good things, but their fight doesn’t always make sense anymore. In any case, you can smell something new rising out of the mess in Iraq and the changed American labor market. From among the veterans of this new bad war and the refugees of the global economy, some kind of movement is bound to arise. Who knows what that will be called – but it’s safe to say it won’t be called liberalism.

_Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. His next book, Smells Like Dead Elephants, is due out next year.

COMMENTS:

I'm a do nothing, my friends are do nothings, my neighbors are do nothings, my siblings are do nothings, their friends are do nothings, their neighbors are do nothings. If we are going to ever wrench back any of the world from the power elite it's gonna take massive boycotts and years of deprivation because once we stop feeding their machine they run out of juice, once they're out of juice they are just like us then we can take 'em. The definition of a do nothing is anyone anywhere living anything close to a middle class American lifestyle. Was it W.C. Fields who yelled out the window after a loud sound outside woke him while sleeping on his desk "QUIET DOWN OUT THERE CAN'T YOU SEE I'M TRYING TO WORK!" I could go on but my sedatives are wearing off and I have to go back to work.
Danm

The problem is with the US Left is the apathy of the US voter. Instead voting and/or running for office, most young people don't even bother to register to vote. Until that attitude changes, the far right will continue to shape US foreign and domestic policies for the foreseeable future.
Mike Smith

If Ann Coulter wants to call you a fag because you're a liberal, it doesn't mean that you're a fag. It just means that Ann Coulter is a meanspirited bitch. I apologize if that was inappropriate, but her track record speaks for itself.
Dan

What a crappy essay. I kept reading it for just a miserable hint of insight and I found none. No real explanations, no theories, no insights, just a recitation of already known facts. One after another in rapid succession to numb the reader's brain. You know how quickly I can dynamite this entire piece of shite? In exactly 5 seconds. Everything this essay accuses liberals of applies equally to conservatives. That's it, kaput. You're describing generic features of the American political process. Right down to the delusion that political parties are fighting an evil government that is other than themselves. Generic features can't explain specific events. The reason why stars collapse into black holes is not because the universe exists. Go back to school. Better yet, get a brain transplant. And your solution to all that ails the American left is what? A name change. How fucking corporatocratic! You want to know what's the problem with the American left? YOU are the problem with the American left.
Richard Kulisz

The apathy of the US voter is one of the left's greatest strengths. The more people that lose faith in American democracy, the more revolutionary working-class politics will become. I am not apathetic. I chose not to vote. I agree with RK and LC here in that this is a silly and bullshit article. We'll see how ineffective your liberal, progressive, Marx-bashing stance is, while real leftists aren't afraid of polarizing politics and don't hide behind passive words.
Snake May

interesting article. i guess the beef with liberals you had was that it seems they are no longer the leftist working class but a bunch of starbucks sipping college grads...i get that vibe sometimes, also. i know this is not true though because a lot of 'liberals' don't get into the whole politics thing and instead do our own thing with local no-pro's and community centers, spending time with actual people. you make an interesting point that liberals, all they do is cry and not do anything. your article pretty much speaks for itself as you point out problems and no call to action.
average jae

Some serious horseshit right here, Matt old buddy. Look at the overdone production qualities of this magazine. Don't need to whack so many trees down to tell me not to buy shit, cuz I don't. Reread the solipsistic, self-righteous meanderings of your article. Maybe you need to write for a serious magazine like Spin or Vibe, instead of the dreary, seriously overripe, consumer-pandering-in-the-extreme Rolling Stone. Hopefully you'll be giving this away to the nursing homes of the Baby Boomers, 'cuz not many of them will be buying it. And what is all this hey crap, M. Diddy? Seems to me like you wield lots more crybabypower than anyone reading this self-aggrandizing screed does. Whine on, little manjust because Yawn Loser is now snorting men's buttholes rather than cocaine doesn't mean he's any more relevant.
Lamb Cannon

Just longing for the day when all this is seen for what the political and current economic system is, small, unevolved, and exasperating inane in it's illusion. When a article like this will become irrelevant and will be seen like a 1st grade essay in it's scope and meaning in society. Great, another worthy cause to join as this whole system sputters towards disaster while people argue over liberal and conservative tags, like osteriches with their heads in the ground to what really matters. My main interest is waiting to see if the wake up call to true reality and possiblility of the human race will be a slow or sudden one for the masses.
Gideon

I think in this comming elections people should vote for RON PAUL for president he makes so much senss and has a real good record people should look him up.
shane

How sad. And how true. As someone who's worked for both major political parties in the US, I can say that this essay is the unadulterated truth. I generally don't agree with the Republicans' political stances, but they're better company than the Democrats. As a rich suburban housewife who grew up working-class dirt poor, both parties' statements about the poor are usually as unbelievable as they are offensive, the Democrats' more so because they truly believe they are trying to serve the best interests of the working class. Voter apathy is not the problem, it's the effect. The majority of America has NO ONE that represents them. But both the Conservatives and Liberals say they do. The difference is that the Liberals believe their own propaganda.
Vicky Harper

Angst or action.
Tom

Richard. Did you read the article I read? no theories? All through the article, he was saying a major problem was Chardonnay socialists speaking for the liberal movement, with a disconnect from the working class, who they should be representing. And your classic "It's rubbish because the conservatives do the same." Just because someone else does something, doesn't stop it being true, and beside the point conservatives don't do the same. The conservative movement represent rich people who don't care about anyone except their rich buddies. Due to liberals caring too much about what are fringe issues to a large body of people (gay and womens rights), and ignoring the class struggle, the conservatives have got the working poor to vote for them, so that they can be sure their little girl won't get married to a lesbian in a commitment ceremony.
Fishy

Taibbi's picture of liberalism is to an extent a generalized caricature of the situation in the year 2000, and I don't think it accurately represents the entire picture today in '07. Over the last four years a healthy resurgence in grassroots political organizing on behalf of progressive candidates has developed, and most of it takes advantage of the tremendous power of the internet. So-called netroots activism had a material affect on a number of Congressional races in 2004, and helped bring about Democratic control of Congress. However, his point regarding the economic disconnect between self-described liberals and working-class citizens is accurate and relevant. Complicating the picture is the fact that the disconnect is not just economic. George Wallace proved in 1968 that a significant portion of the American working class is anything but liberal on social and cultural issues, and the success of the Republican party over the last ten years in persuading economically marginalized Americans to vote for GOP candidates purely on hot-button social issues indicates this is still the case. Part of the problem that progressives face in advocating for liberal values is one of the unfortunate legacies of late 20th-century American liberalism: at its worst, it seemed to become little more than an exquisitely calibrated exercise in highly selective excusemaking. Depending on the race, ethnicity, or economic class of the people involved, liberals all too often have abandoned their own personal values and diffidently excused a whole range of destructive behaviors and attitudes that materially harm entire communities and regions as well as individuals. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of liberalism's victories in the early 1960s in opening up society to different ways of thinking and living; most successful political or social movements will eventually become extreme. The conservative movement that has been ascendant over the last two decades is now characterized by nothing less than the wholesale abandonment of its own supposed beliefs in personal prudence, individual liberty, economic thrift, and small government in favor of a bloated greed-oriented corporatism, an enthusiasm for torture, a medieval rejection of empirical knowledge in favor of religious faith, and above all fealty to a Great Leader. The increasingly widespread disgust with these conservative pathologies is providing new opportunities for progressives to make the case for what is best in liberalism.
Don Hammond

It made me think.
.Jeff.

Jealousy, the green eyed monster rises like a Phoenix from its Republican ashes once again.
Sharon

You know what pisses me off, is when, as a person looking to change things, you read as much as you can, learn all you can, try all you can, and try to be accepting of everything and it gets all fucked up! Your efforts get flushed and belittled and people sit back and fire shots at you. I will stick to my guns that one hour spent at the pub with people making just enough to pay for their night out beats the shit out of discussing what's wrong with the world with a bunch of self-obsessed weiners. If your article was good for anything it was good for making me even angrier at reading this kind of drivel. I read cause I'm bored, I'm bored cause I'm doing something I have no control over and it would make no difference who's doing what I am doing right now. That is what kids grow up with these days. The feeling that it doesn't matter who does a job because it will be done by someone. Where I'm going I don't know but if it's intolerance and anger you're trying to spread you did it you liberal pisstank. Time to go fight the royalty review that's going on here that's set to keep feeding the beast. Get on an issue and fight for it, stand for something, spread the word you bitches, no disrespect to bitches out there.
Steve in Oilberta

There is a movement that is arising. Some call it the green wave and it's more than a fad this time. It's not just about the environment anymore there are two movements colliding at tremendous speeds. The social justice movement and the environmental movement are converging. Paul Hawken has just written a book on this called Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. He explains, we can either separate, become more violent, we can, you know, shrink into our bastions of ignorance, or like what we do in an emergency, in an accident, is really reach out to others and open ourselves up and realize that the distinctions we make about what separates us are really unimportant, and what unites us are values which are universal and common and have existed here for thousands of years. The time has come, no need to be partisan about it.
JM

Yoboy...did I read this right. They're also the best-educated class, with over one in four being postgraduates. Is this a problem? Actually most of us don't wage our finger at yous....we been watching you our whole lives and can't believe what we see. We are trying hard to live the american dream with some helping of others who can't help themselves...and guess what, most of us do not fly the rainbow flag and we certainly are not pacificists.
Upyours

It is interesting in our culture that we tend not to listen, but bash what is said by the other on a personal level. Debate is good and we can only become more flexible and learn when we listen and process. Why is it so important for humans of all political backgrounds to attack another's views so we can maintain our own without introspection? Must we hold on to our tightly held views so strongly so we don't lose them? Is this our identity? Everything changes every second, try not to cling so tightly.
Anne Acadia

You're right. The liberals of today are a bunch of rich kids who pretend to have the interests of america at heart.
Xander

Look up 'Progressive Conservative' and you'll see the Canadians understood this quite a few years ago. Your premise is right, but might have been helped by a good editor. Liberal is a dirty word and won't be viable as a label for anything any time soon. But a lengthy attack on the current liberal constituency with a tone of bitterness and resentment plays to the 'let's find someone to blame' neoconservative mentality. Readers might have responded well to the advancement of additional Progressive solutions. While I've always liked 'Progressive' conservative or otherwise, I think 'idealist' and 'idealism' play well to American values, our practicality notwithstanding. I look forward to future essays when your optimism and belief in Man's capacity for Good inform your call to action and renewed social responsibility. Never give up – Never surrender! ... showing up is always half the battle.
George Watson

I'm not a liberal or a progressive. If I had to jump in a pigeonhole, it would be Paleo-Conservative or Agrarian (for those who think Agrarian means you have to own a farm, please read some Wendell Berry). I agree with most of the article, and I also agree with most of what Richard Kulisz says in his comments. Both sides of the liberal/conservative debate have slipped into the stripmined hole left by people who will exploit anything they can get their hands on for a buck. The current definition of Conservative needs to be understood as NeoConservative – Bush is a NeoConservative – they're the ones that put us in Iraq. Sadly for liberals, the attempt to differentiate between Classical Liberals, Liberals, NeoLiberals etc... has not been as effective. I like Pat Buchanan, I like Ron Paul. I'm sure either one of them is enough to make make progressives spit fire, but I think as more people move towards Third Party politics, the Republicrats and Demoblicans will eventually slip into the holes they've dug for themselves. And when they go, the money won't follow them – it will simply move to exploit whatever fills the vacuum they leave behind. Then we'll have a fresh fight, and a new crop of wealthy elites on both sides of the aisle to contend with.
Christopher Bitner Hayes

nice comments, the time for old hippies and stuffed shirts is over. the dems are just as bad as the reps. the line of distinction between the two has eveporated. as for liberals, amen brother, what a bunch of lame old sadsacks. can we please get some straight-talking politicians, instead of rehashing some old shit from the '60s? all of the washington dirtbags need to be booted.
jst

Guilty as charged, I had liberal parents but was raised in the deep south. While I sometimes spoke out against racism, sexism, commercialism, and the general overbearing absurdity of American culture it was much easier and fulfilling to move out west and go to a liberal college. Here my values were reinforced instead of scoffed at or pondered wildeyed and weary on. Ultimately, the knowledge of what our dear nation gets up to or ignores is too much to bear so I reject it and move to another country where I can romantically compare the pitfalls of Korean or Japanese society to the many wonderous accomplishments of the great U.S. of A. It's nice over here, Ya'll should come check it out.
Micah Holmstrom

My roommate has been trying to unionize his starbucks for the last year. One of his coworkers was a latino woman who had been working at starbucks for several years. She had scars on her hands from making lattes. After talking to my white, college educated leftist roomate about the union, she agreed it was a good idea and would join. This article was terrible, but it points to an important point, that we of the left, need to spend more time with the labor movement, more time doing original research, more time helping out at battered womens shelters, more time building up alternatives, and less time getting fucked up on drugs and acting out whatever privileges we might have as though it were freedom.
Scribbler

Western democracy, the great hope, has run out of steam and ideas. Politicians are MANAGERS now. RETORT, a gathering of antagonists to capital empire, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, meet every once in a while, in an effort to confront the current political moment and forms of resistance to it. This group speaks for a left that is not the left described in the above article. Their book makes for interesting reading 'Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a new age of war'.
Nitsuj

Thank you for exploring this often oversimplified issue. I think the same reasons I am uncomfortable with identifying myself as a liberal is the same reason I am uncomfortable identifying myself as a feminist. There is still a shit ton that needs to change. But now we have the power to do it. We need to shut the fuck up and start making goals and taking action.
Annie

Was that supposed to be an overview of the American left? What a joke. You didn't mention anarchists, the green party, or the comparison of Amerika to Nazi germany. Oh wait, I guess you did do that last thing.
Americana Californicus

"A man who is not a liberal in his 20's has no heart. A man who is not conservative in his 30's has no brain." — Winston Churchill
Rick Sparks

America is supposed to be a place where we can speak up and say what we feel. These days, America is turning into a place where you turn on the television and hear what your supposed to believe and feel. The media has taken over many people's minds. Individuals believe everything they see on ads, television, internet, etc. We need to start understand the huge influence it plays on so many lives, and the consequences it completes.
Samantha

Want to know what's wrong with liberalism? Read the responses to the article. A lot of sniping and name calling, a few veiled threats, backbiting galore, people accusing the author of being stupid, complicit, pathetic and self-agrandizing. The article does have some problems, but wow, what quality debate. Incisive, really helpful thoughts. We'll all go far with this fuel in our tanks.
Cooter

Thanks for a pretty good description of what the right is projecting. I've worked 25 years in abject poverty. I work to educate. I think liberal is actually kind of cool. Sounding. I hear a little piece of jazz, maybe Coltrane, maybe City of New Orleans, maybe a little lick from someone who turned to play to have somewhere to excell. To express human spirit. Yeah, that's the way it plays in my head. Coming from freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote very eloquently on the downside of liberalism in America raising some of your points. I believe you are advocating active participation in working with people. No one could fault that. And less equivocating. If we define the term liberal, liberalism as a pathology and own the rhetoric machine, buy into this too far, or in fact buy into the definitions (see Murray Edelman and our current American definition makers), and look through that mirror, things are over. No hope. No way to proceed. Totally compromised. A bunch of world fools that missed the greatest chance yet. I prefer to take a day at a time, make good efforts, not allow myself to forget the value of personal action. And to sort the things that matter. But as I'm also at present rolling in a little angst fest....your post allowed my internal machinations to clear through some haze. I've always got to say thanks for that.
Sarah Puglisi

lol the left
a

While I agree that neither party really represents the interests of working people any more, the terms Liberal and Conservative seem nearly meaningless to me against the backdrop of today's political landscape. Since the government is now of the rich, by the rich & for the rich, Reps & Dems merely represent 2 different styles of exploitation. Nothing will really change until things get so bad for average people that we again seize the reins of our own destiny, instead of hoping a change of administration is going to make a difference. Problem is, the worse things get, the less time & energy we have to act in our own best interest. It takes most of our time, energy and money to keep the ruling class rich.
Gary Politzer

The usually people who like that person who near the stand. anyways, we should don't hurt to children. The children is our dream and future. you guys know. ring? so you know i mean
Jacob

Thank you! Thoughtful and harsh like we need it to be. It's always so hard though, to read the comments after such writing because all the mediocrity floats to the top again. Please think and don't think you have to respond to such writing always, with your little personal and often defensive thoughts. Think please.
Ilona

I really enjoyed this piece because the author takes the time to explain in natural tone why the Democrats are in trouble. He doesn't speak down to us or act as if only the ruling elite will be reading his words. This isn't really an essay, it is more of a philosophical diatribe on the weaknesses of the AMERICAN LEFT. It is also a strident warning that the only way American liberalism will survive the coming generational divide is if the twentysomethings of today stop complaining and create some action. People!!! Take to the streets and fucking burn the whitehouse down...Remove that silly Puppet you call president and start over again. 9/11 didn't change anything, by the way, it only gave the Neocons a perceptible context to try and take over the world. Bill Maher was right, when we look back on history, the events of Sept 11/01, which were horrifying and utterly mesmorizing all at once, will be lumped into a hishhash litany of attacks that could have been prevented. As a Canadian it is frustrating to sit back and watch our neighbours to the south in a constant state of utter bamboozlement.
Bizzness

Well, aside from not quite being able to figure out that in a population of 300 million, 30 million isn't enough to elect a dog catcher... This is pretty good description of why the left can't win. Another reason is that it seems to be unable to give anyone any vision other than living on tofu and giving up the things that they like, like their cars and houses. The contemporary American liberal is an excuse to use the mute button because they have nothing to say worth listening to.
Charles Cosimano

"I therefore prefer the word progressive, which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations." Progressive is not quite a neutral word. It implies that your opponents' opinions are regressive, which is certainly up for debate. Progressive means forward-looking, that may be a catchy label, it may be what you think your opinions are, but it doesn't describe them at all. Can't you think of a word that actually sums up your beliefs?
Eli

Actually, that makes progressive the perfect word to use, precisely because it frames the right's opinions, placing them in contrast as being regressive. Ever read the book "Don't think of an Elephant?" The right chooses their words VERY carefully, and hammers them home, for this very reason. If Progressive implies that the right's policies are regressive, good – it should. In addition, the word also does do a good job of describing progressive opinion, since the very word progress immediately brings to mind change in a forward direction from what we currently have. That's pretty good for just one word.
Eli2

I agree with some of what Taibbi writes, especially the middle-class American youths' delusion that we are fighting some epic battle against The Man. However, I don't appreciate his frequent and annoying jabs at environmentalism and other important issues. It's obvious that the social momentum of the sixties was smoothly coopted into mass capitalist culture. Duh. This IS the Adbusters website. Taibbi doesn't need to be redundant. Overall, a good article. BUT WAIT. Taibbi spent 95% of the essay doing exactly what he evidently hates: railing hysterically against an institution without offering any solutions or valuable insight. Maybe it wasn't great after all...
Beth

Interestingly... this debate reinforces the cruces of the article.
liberals are not leftists

Women are the poor, and the poor are women. Now that equal pay for equal work is in danger of becoming unenforceable, we are about to become even poorer. The Man does not feel he owes us anything if he can get us to go on working for free. We don't exist, by working for free we stand accused of unpaid idleness. We'll be begging in the streets while the Dems and Repubs try to choose what to order off the same menu. NO Left political movement that forgets the poverty of women has any meaning.
Poor Woman

Historically, the Left had a vision: replace capitalism with socialism. Almost everywhere in the world, serious socialist and communist parties emerged and contended for power, and were successful over a third of the earth. In America, socialism didn't resonate with the working class, and so the American Left emerged as liberals, slow-motion socialists. The Left is still anticapitalist – at varying levels of consciousness – but has no positive vision of what it wants to replace capitalism with. For a while, the exciting new socialist societies of China, Cuba and Vietnam inspired the American Left, and still do attract the admiration of sections of it. But they somehow didn't really retain their holding power and nothing really big and attractive has come along to take their place. Perhaps Venezuela will work out ... if Mr Chavez carries on in the revolutionary tradition of closing down right-wing propaganda outlets, and moves on towards seizing the wealth of Venezuela's rich class and putting the economy into the hands of the workers state. Perhaps some good work can be done in America by the prefiguration of revolutionary rule. There are few places where the Left has much power, but where such power is held by the Left, let it be used. At the moment, this is mainly on college campuses, and some Leftists are doing good work there by breaking up conservative meetings and attempting to make racist and sexist and homophobic speech and thought into crimes. Showing what a future socialist society would be like by suppressing right-wing reactionaries and wiping out thoughtcrime could go a long way towards reversing the image of the Left as drippy, sandal-wearing wimps.
Doug

http://www.ciwonline.org/index.html The social justice project unites students and workers, migrants and musicians...like the Starbucks Workers Union too there are many examples of solidarity unionism/community and workplace struggles combined...here in Australia we had the Green Bans by the Builders labourer's Federation where the unionists wanted to leave bush and build hospitals, schools not prisons and ripoff developments. The BLF was deregistered in 1970s but their spirit continues.
Viola Wilkins

Are the youth born in between 1980 and 1995 a lost cause? If so, I'm lost; however, what about the present youth? There is talk of blame and frustration. Rather than solving the problem by fixing the self-centered system that conditions us all, why not change it through the children who are not so completely warped? We speak of solidarity between rich college kids and the working class. You know what? I've been taught to think of myself and acheive the capitaist America dream since I began elementary school. Maybe we should take a look at how our education system shuns communal achievement in favor of honor roles/deans' lists/first prizes/valedictorians. I don't pretend to say that competition between students is all bad, but rather that, from my experience, I have seen students fall down and stay down because we higher achievers were told that to lean down is to risk tripping one's own feet. Discussion is sexy. Holding out your hand is beautiful.
Roberto

yea, so the left sucks, so does the right, and it is somewhat erronous to even make a huge distinction between them: they have the same basic needs for survival, and support each other in maintaining those basic illusions. but how long will we sit, still transfixed by the antics of powercrazy fools, their benefactor puppets, and the herds that, hypnotized, follow them? who of us will sit on their computer until the last moment, trying desperately to piece together a meaningful and practical understanding of the giant knot that is our politics, and be poisoned by it's structural vulgarity? how many hours will be wasted as we study this charade, baffled and outraged, and still try to think on ITS terms? our basic freedoms are found in reclaiming our own mindspace completely, rediscovering the world in a context totally severed from the confused massmind, and cultivating direct experience of life, and direct access to our inherent intuitive knowledge, unmediated by any man's law or word of his doings.
tyler

Discussion is sexy and holding out your hand is beautiful! Education is soooo key to these issues. I feel as though we are molding our children like clay, when maybe all they need is a little a dampness and nurturing.
Me

This writer comrades "Matt Taibbi" **** contributing editor to Rolling Stone: Is a f***ing liberal, rambling in the reactionary bourgeois style of writing reminiscent of Czarist Russia as he does to fill an article with useless prose as most often he gets paid by bourgeois publication a per word piece rather than being wage slave: I don't care if someone is a liberal if anyone labels me liberal or conseravtive I don't give a F *** because for the last 40 years I've also called myself a democrat, Democrat, radical, anarchosindicalist, socialist and communist and as such my being liberal or conservative is in a completely different context than the people normally refered to as so-called liberals or conservatives so this article seems to be boring us without a proper context and most response do not call to task what has become an all too prevalent style of writing on the so-called left which I call rambling good for poetry and song writing bad for communication. So I HATE THIS ARTICLE!
Andrew Stergiou

my comment didn't appear, because someone thought it shouldn't be seen? i've been censored, and the package is delivered as it's controllers please it to be. funny experiencing that with adbusters, of all people; but then, it isn't so odd, i suppose.
tyler

This is an essential essay. Another apropos example: Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, and Kosovo without UN approval, claimed Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda he was named as a conspirator on the Cole indictment, supported an antiterrorism bill in the wake of the McVeigh bombing that civil libertarians decried, proposed to end welfare as we know it and did just that, advocated for NAFTA which environmentalists and union leaders railed against, signed the so-called Defense of Marriage act and in the face of all this, most liberals' objections were muted at best. Then Bush comes in and enacts similar things, and suddenly we're somehow sliding into Weimar Germany for all the hysteria he provoked. It's what convinced me that for most liberals, their outrage is really driven in large part by marketing and brand identification. Clinton has that D on the end of his name and gives a good speech that hits their sweet spots, and that's really all that matters.
WJA

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