Liberalism is what Made this Country what it is Today

The following is an excerpt from "Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It" by Alan Wolfe, it is very accurate in my opinion:

"Conservatives dominate American politics. Conservative ideas, however, do not. In fact, conservatives have risen to power only by borrowing their ideas from liberals. In the 1930s, conservatives attacked the New Deal, including that radical innovation called Social Security; today conservatives insist that they want to privatize Social Security only to save it. In the 1940s, conservatives opposed American entry into World War II; now they attack Democrats for being soft on defense. In the 1950s, conservatives found no fault with a society in which women stayed home and raised children while men worked; these days, they compete for the votes of working women. Conservatives voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to which now, in their opposition to affirmative action, they swear fidelity. The enviornmental gains achieved during the 1970s cannot be rolled back unless conservatives stand in front of trees and canyons and proclaim their love of nature. Look at who holds office in America, and you would think that the right governs the country. Pay attention to what they say--but not, of course, to what they do--and you would be convinced liberalism had triumphed.

The oddest aspect of liberalism's retreat from greatness is that liberals have so much of which they can be proud. Without liberalism, supporters of states' rights and property rights would have triumphed over ideals of civil rights. Take away the New Deal and the Great Society, and that many more Americans would be living today in conditions no twentieth-century human being could accept. Had liberals not been willing to challenge totalitarianism, and to bring about the changes in fiscal policy and governmental structure necessary to do so effectively, who can say how many people in the world would be denied basic freedoms? No wonder conservatives appeal to liberal ideas; their own, at least in their original form, ought to make them ashamed. It is true that liberals have overreached from time to time, legislating equality too bluntly or regulating business too enthusiastically. Conservatives rightly called them on their excesses, not, as it turns out, to replace liberalism, but to adjust its sights more realistically. In these seemingly more conservative times, a book like Louis Hartz's "The Liberal Tradition of America", which saw liberalism victorious everywhere, would seem out of date; actually, its thesis has never been proven more relevant.

Liberalism won the battle of ideas for one simple reason: the twenty-first century comes after the eighteenth. The aristocratic order that conservatism defended in Europe--and to a lesser degree in the American South--is gone for good, and no one argues that it ought to make a comeback. Equality is so powerfully hardwired into American political culture that the only way conservatives can further inequality is by claiming to speak in the name of the people against the arrogance of the elites. For better or worse, liberty in contemporary times is defined as not only the right of businessmen to get what they want but the right of everybody else to get what they want as well. These are the brute facts of contemporary American politcal life. No one can argue against them. Yet liberals, who for the past century or so have worked these facts to their advantage, have, in the past few decades, sat back and allowed conservatives, whose most cherished ideals stand in the radical discord with the real world around them, to beat them at their own game."

this is almost as funny as the clinton army thing.

we ALL made this country what it is today.thats something that isnt left or right.liberals and republicans and independents and anarchists and everybody else under the moon.thats why we run the show,god i love this country no matter whos in charge.

amsterdam does have a point... the civil war had both sides fighting for different factions...

but amsterdam you should care who;s in charge. not everyone is as good for the job as the first.


move over king george. all hail nicholasstanko's infinite wisdom...