Purely on a whim, I've decided to offer the occasional new feature here on The Cigar, namely Required Reading. Basically, when I stumbled across articles, blogposts, commentary on the 'net that's too good and too thought-provoking to be missed, I'll post it here… and then you really should go read it and discuss amongst yourselves. I'm just saying.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/12/08/the-crisis-of-the-american-intellectual/
- http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/01/12/the-top-global-trends-for-the-2010s/
- http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/01/28/american-challenges-the-blue-model-breaks-down/
Truly, the most fascinating thought provoking commentary I've found on the internet for a long time. Does it lean to the right? Yes, but the overall point is there. Liberalism as we know it just doesn't work anymore. Post-Eisenhower neither did Conservatism which is why Goldwater proved to be so important to the development of the modern Conservative movement as we know it. His immolation in '64 helped to spark an intellectual revival of the basic debate about what exactly Conservatism should be about.
Liberalism has had no such intellectual cleansing. For all the criticism, both right and wrong of the Conservative movement out of all the vitriol that gets thrown from the right, it is a curious fact of American political life that the Left, in many ways is more conservative and reactionary than the right. No one is more resistant to change in things like education than Teacher's Unions- or unions in general for that matter. And woe betide the politician foolish enough to even breathe of doing one solitary thing to Social Security or Medicare.
While the tenuous connection liberalism has with reality and it's frankly sclerotic insistence at picking at the dry and dusty bones of the New Deal and the Great Society make it far too easy to reject, it is not yet clear to me that Conservatism has anything better to offer. Although anti-statist in nature, I cannot support the notion of an unrestrained free market. A light touch is need to protect the citizenry from abuses on the part of corporations and companies- if we are a system of checks and balances politically, then we need sane and sensible checks and balances economically as well. This position is an anathema to modern conservative thought. Don't take this to mean that I think we need cloying, clingy governmental regulatory agencies, far from it: we just need laws to protect consumers but not at the expense of restraining business and we need public servants willing to do the hard thinking and compromising to find that sweet spot.
Republicans spout the ideals of the hard working Middle Class, yet do little to benefit them- and any speeches about the glories of the free market trickling down to the little people here in the boonies needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. We need reform now, we need help now, we need action now- not at the pace dictated by the corporations the Republicans would like to sell us out too. Government should not intrude on the people, but should rather be responsive to the people. Policy should benefit not special interest groups, but the largest number of PEOPLE possible. The current path conservatism would have us march down, I'm increasingly convinced will only serve to highlight to wealth disparities, destroy the Middle Class as we know it and create conditions for either severe political, societal or economic breakdown that will only revive the zombie-like strains of liberal intellectualism from the last century.
All of which I would find incredibly irritating…
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