Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

How would you know what that was until you listed all the L/C events out? And if the political zeitgeist shifted to conservatism in 1941, then why use the 1946 date?

Who said it shifted to conservatism in 1941? Do you understand how the events are used?

It took Nixon longer to end the war in Vietnam than for Roosevelt and Truman to end WWII. .

Roosevelt and Truman won the war. It's easy to end a war if you are winning, just defeat the enemy. It's not so easy to end a war when you are losing, but are unwilling to capitulate. Nixon said he would end the war. He didn't say he would lose it.

Furthermore, as Nixon faced tough questions as to how he was ending the war, he would have to argue back by pointing to specific events and moves that supported his case, unless you are willing to just accept Richard Nixon's word that he wasn't lying and being deceptive about it

It has nothing to do with accepting Nixon's word. Sure he was just blowing smoke with his "secret plan to end the war". But after he was elected, he did end the war. Troop levels headed down from their early 1969 peak and by the next election ground troops had been withdrawn.

Your events list ought to convince me that indeed the American people were ready to shed a lot of blood and money in one war but not the other war.

I don't understand this.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

How would you know what that was until you listed all the L/C events out? And if the political zeitgeist shifted to conservatism in 1941, then why use the 1946 date?

Who said it shifted to conservatism in 1941? Do you understand how the events are used?

I'll return to this later. For now, please explain "how the events are used," and exactly why, as simply as you can.

Originally Posted by President Nixon

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

It took Nixon longer to end the war in Vietnam than for Roosevelt and Truman to end WWII. .

Roosevelt and Truman won the war. It's easy to end a war if you are winning, just defeat the enemy. It's not so easy to end a war when you are losing, but are unwilling to capitulate. Nixon said he would end the war. He didn't say he would lose it.

What we want to do now is to end this war in a way that will discourage those that might start another war, so that we can have a full generation of peace for all Americans. (October 30, 1970)

Nixon took a page from Truman in order to achieve this "peace with honor" goal: He drove the enemy to the negotiating table by bombing the crap out of them in December of 1972. Within a month it was over.

The difference between WWII and Vietnam was in the aftermath. We stayed to win the peace in Japan, but we left Vietnam, in April of 1975, and thereby lost the "peace with honor."

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Furthermore, as Nixon faced tough questions as to how he was ending the war, he would have to argue back by pointing to specific events and moves that supported his case, unless you are willing to just accept Richard Nixon's word that he wasn't lying and being deceptive about it

It has nothing to do with accepting Nixon's word... after he was elected, he did end the war.

The worst bombing in North Vietnam occured *after* Nixon's second election. Why didn't America respond to McGovern's "Come home America" campaign, and throw Nixon out for having failed to "end the war" as promised a full four years before? Instead America solidly rejected McGovern, and still faced an escalating bombing campaign by Nixon. Yet, Nixon's approval numbers were still very high at this time.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Your events list ought to convince me that indeed the American people were ready to shed a lot of blood and money in one war but not the other war.

I don't understand this.

We bombed the hell out of both Vietnam and Japan to drive them toward peace. It worked both times. We merely lost the peace afterward in Vietnam (we still maintain troops in Germany, Japan and Korea). Why was this? Did it have to do with the Liberal/Conservative paradigm, you claim your "events" methodology show? And why did it take a full ten to twelve years, from 1962/64 to 1975, for America to get in step with it's new "liberal" peace paradigm?

Forgive me for asking these questions but I really believe they are important and relavent to today.

I have wondered what sort of roles an elder generation might have outside of its archetype. Perhaps a sort of quasi-traditional role, the preservers of old arts/crafts/skills? Quoting:

"...Elizabeth Davis, who spent most of her years in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, near Brentwood where she was born, agrees with Louis's cycles of history theory, citing the recurrent interest in traditions as another example. One such tradition that is enjoying a resurgence of attention is quilting, Mrs. Davis's particular area of expertise. Almost Louis's age of 103, Lizzie Davis learned to piece quilts at the age of six, 'and I'm still at it, sure enough,' she tells with an enthusiastic grin. When asked about what interests, pastimes, or hobbies they have had through the years, the majority of women centenarians mention quilting. Many, like Lizzie, still piece quilts, giving their creations as gifts to family members, donating them to church organizations for needy families and sometimes, like Lizzie, selling them to earn money.

"...'For many years, the art of quilting fell into disregard,' says quilt expert Betsy May Stern, originally of Nashville, Tennessee, and now of Scarsdale, New York. 'For the past several years, there has been a revival of interest, and women of all ages are once again quilting and collecting quilts.' Quilting is achieving new attention with museum displays, newspaper articles about the values of quilts, state and local historical projects, quilting clubs, books and documentaries...."

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

I'll return to this later. For now, please explain "how the events are used," and exactly why, as simply as you can.

The events appear in a timeline, labeled C or L. Over a trailing 15 year year period the total number of C's are counted and divided by the total number of events. This ratio is plotted versus time.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Nixon took a page from Truman in order to achieve this "peace with honor" goal: He drove the enemy to the negotiating table by bombing the crap out of them in December of 1972. Within a month it was over.

It took four years to get to December 1972. By this time the US had withdrawn all of our ground troops, clearly sending a message that the US was throwing in the towel. Nixon needed a face-saving way to exit. The bombing campaign convinced the North to let us leave without it being an obvious defeat. (That would come two years later).

The difference between WWII and Vietnam was in the aftermath. We stayed to win the peace in Japan, but we left Vietnam, in April of 1975, and thereby lost the "peace with honor."

The difference between WW II and Vietnam is we won the first and lost the second. There was no peace. We signed a ceasefire agreement that returned US POWs to America. America then withdrew the rest of our forces. Nixon called it a peace agreement. But it just a ceasefire. After we left, the war resumed and ended in victory for the North.

The worst bombing in North Vietnam occured *after* Nixon's second election. Why didn't America respond to McGovern's "Come home America" campaign, and throw Nixon out for having failed to "end the war" as promised a full four years before? Instead America solidly rejected McGovern, and still faced an escalating bombing campaign by Nixon. Yet, Nixon's approval numbers were still very high at this time.

Nixon had withdrawn US ground forces, American boys weren't getting shot up in the jungle anymore by 1972. The flood of body bags had diminished to a trickle. Nixon had kept his promise, without losing the war. McGovern wanted to lose the war.

We merely lost the peace afterward in Vietnam

This is bogus, you are engaging in Soviet-style revisionist history. The North intended to conquer the South. And they would have done so if US ground forces weren't there to stop them. The US could preserve South Vietnam as a separate political entity indefinitely as long as those forces remained.

Nixon started withdrawing troops in 1969 and completed this withdrawal in 1971. There was no longer anything to stop the North from taking over. The South Vietnamese army was no match for the North, even with American air support. They couldn't win, but with American air support they could maintain the conflict at a draw for a while.

Air power cannot by itself win wars. You need forces on the ground to take and hold territory. The US was able to eliminate the need for an invasion of Japan by threatening genocide. A single bomb leveled a whole city. And we had done it twice. How many of these things did we have? Actually we didn't have any left, but the Japs didn't know that.

The US did not use nukes in Vietnam. We did not even threaten genocide. There was no way to force the North to yield what couldn't be achieved on the battlefield.

Nixon wanted out. He hiked the bombing to very high levels to convince the North to sign a ceasefire, which would maintain the draw long enough for the US to competely withdraw without losing face (what he called "peace with honor"). Then the North would finish off the South.

We still maintain troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. Why was this? Did it have to do with the Liberal/Conservative paradigm, you claim your "events" methodology show?

It has nothing to do with the L/C thing.

And why did it take a full ten to twelve years, from 1962/64 to 1975, for America to get in step with it's new "liberal" peace paradigm?

What liberal peace paradigm? What are you talking about?

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

McGovern wanted to lose the war.

Those six words pretty much sum it all up. Thus the amazing forty year transformation of the liberal Democratic Party. The party that had guided America through Depression and World War, and had emerged victorious through both, had now turned defeatist. As the election of 1972 drew close, Democrats eagerly awaited as America would surely choose to join them on their new crusade. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., their "court historian," believed he could discern the handwriting on the wall:

• If anyone wants historical analogies for McGovern, the appropriate analogy would be not Goldwater in 1964 but Roosevelt in 1932. Forty years ago, as today, the nation was in a state of political and economic frustration. Ordinary people in 1932 felt a profound mistrust of the Establishment and widespread estrangement from the political order. Confronted by stalemate and alienation, Franklin Roosevelt understood the imperative necessity of bringing about a realignment of political and economic forces.
  
  In the same way, George McGovern stands today for the rejuvenation of the Democratic party. He is the leader of a coalition of citizen participation, a coalition for change, as broad as F.D.R.'s coalition of 1932. As he thus proves he understands the vital currents of our time, he will bring along the regulars as surely as Roosevelt did 40 years ago. -- "Why McGovern will win," The New York Times (Feb, 1972)

And so, even today, the Democratic Party remains mired in the quagmire of what Franklin D. Roosevelt called the "tired, defeatist attitudes" of the past. What a remarkable transformation.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Those six words pretty much sum it all up. Thus the amazing forty year transformation of the liberal Democratic Party.

I just don't see this transformation in the Democrats you keep harping on between 1932 and 1972. I think what you are thinking is that modern liberals have abandoned the liberalism of the past and that this is somehow a "change" initiated by liberals. Of course liberals have abandoned parts of the New Deal consensus. We have abandoned exactly those factors about which there should always be a debate (such as war and peace and fiscal matters) which were appropropriated by conservatives. We did so because we have to, if we didn't then we would be conservatives.

In 1932 your side was isolationist and favored a small military. In the 1950's your side changed its mind and decided to favor a large military, but was still pretty releuctant to "slay monsters abroad" (but were all in favor of goading the Democrats into doing so). This forced my side to favor a small military--so we see McGovern talking about slashing the military by a third. Quite recently your side changed its mind and now favors slaying monsters abroad. This forces my side into isolationism. In both cases it was your side that changed first.

Your side was the fiscal conservatvies and my side the fiscal liberals in the 1950's. In the 1980's your side changed its mind and became fiscally liberal, forcing my side has to become fiscally conservative "Eisenhower Republicans" in the 1990's. You guys changed first, not us.

Liberals and conservatives can only share issues on which there is no disagreement. For everything else, we have to change every time you do.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

In 1932 your side was isolationist and favored a small military. In the 1950's your side changed its mind and decided to favor a large military, but was still pretty releuctant to "slay monsters abroad". . . it was your side that changed first.

So, IF it wasn't until the 1950s that conservative Republicans, like "Martin Barton and Fish!", changed their minds on isolationism and a "small military," what "C"s changed their minds in 1941?

One might reasonably conclude that the New Dealer's who instituted all that pre-war stuff like the draft and Lend-Lease represented the "side" that changed first. Be it far from me to accuse you of using convoluted logic here, but something seems strangely amiss. Given that "your side that changed first" clearly implies that you believe liberals also "changed" somewhere along the line, and we also know that somebody actually was leading the nation in the "Liberal Era" of 1941, one might simply follow the yellow brick road to the simple answer of who changed first.

If I'm not mistaken here, we're reading an exchange between two people trained as engineers. If so, I think I can see why one of them is still in engineering (and applying engineering and scientific principles to studying cyclical phenomena) while the other has left engineering to pursue something less rigorous (and more "artistic").

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

One might reasonably conclude that the New Dealer's who instituted all that pre-war stuff like the draft and Lend-Lease represented the "side" that changed first.

Big military is part of big government. I have already described how liberalism changed in the late 19th century from classical liberalism (libertarianism) to progressive liberalism. Progressives believed that government could solve problems and make things better, both here and abroad. One of their trademarks was activist foreign policy. So the embrace of activist foreign policy comes from the Progressive tradition which gradually became part of the liberal viewpoint.

As liberals became less libertarian and more progressive, conservatives started to incorporate elements of libertarianism into their conservative beliefs. They became more enamored of small government. Federalists, Whigs and Republicans had all supported big government that made investments (internal improvements) in things like canals, roads, ports, transcontinential railroad. But when government started to be used for things like regulating business, conservatvies became less enamored of governmental energy and more favorably disposed to libertarian ideas of limited government.

By the early 1990's conservatives were more or less small-government proponents and liberals were big government proponents. As such they didn't like expensive activist foreign policy like getting involved in big idealist wars like WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam or Iraq II. Liberals were more supportive.

So there was no change in 1941, liberals and conservatives were still acting in a consistent manner.

I posted earlier that I would return to this issue...

"The events appear in a timeline, labeled C or L. Over a trailing 15 year year period the total number of C's are counted and divided by the total number of events. This ratio is plotted versus time."

"The decision to become involved in WW II was made once. Our representatives were were not able to pick and choose which parts of WW II they would support and which parts they would not. The New Deal was different, parts of it were rejected in a piecemeal fashion."

One might reasonably conclude that any scheme that attempts to "measure" the "changes in the political zeitgeist, the spirit of the times," and ends up placing World War II on the same level as the invasion of Panama in 1989 would be seriously lacking. I mean seriously lacking.

But, nobody save me objects to your method of "applying engineering and scientific principles to studying cyclical phenomena," so it looks like you may be on to something here. :wink:

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

I have already described how liberalism changed in the late 19th century from classical liberalism (libertarianism) to progressive liberalism.

I simply hold that whatever was born in, or created if you will, in a fourth turn (ie., winter) becomes the new paradigm, the new rules that govern. In the previous fourth, the U.S. emerged primarily as the leader of the free world (with 70% of the budget designated to foreign policy) and secondarily as a growing welfare state. This was the new liberalism.

In 1972, "liberals" per se abandoned that primary paradigm in favor of more butter, welfare etc... Conservatives, at that point, merely picked up the ball liberals previously owned, and have been running with it ever since.

That liberals, at this same time, nominated a man who prefered that America lose a war is somewhat troubling to conservatives like me, and makes us more than just a little suspicious when they are not more honest about this all the time.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

I simply hold that whatever was born in, or created if you will, in a fourth turn (ie., winter) becomes the new paradigm, the new rules that govern.

The following is the introduction to a book that lays out the argument of how this new paradigm of "liberalism" went awry from it roots. Note how lacking a conservative response to this new paradigm was in 1950 (Schlesinger noted the same exact thing in 1949, while urging conservatives to get their act together):

The Betrayal of Liberalism

The New Criterion
by Hilton Kramer & Roger Kimball

Fifty years ago, in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling wrote his once-famous assessment of the place occupied by liberalism in American intellectual life. This is the key passage:

• In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Notwithstanding the undisguised condescension in Trilling?s tone?a condescension toward conservative thought widely shared by liberals at the time?it was not his purpose in that preface to impugn the totality of the conservative intellectual tradition. On the contrary, it was one of Trilling?s ambitions in The Liberal Imagination to persuade his fellow liberals that they might profit, morally and intellectually, from a careful consideration of the ideas of liberalism?s conservative critics. Believing, however, that there was no contemporary conservative criticism equal to the task of reforming liberal thought in the ways he wished to see it reformed, Trilling called upon liberals to perform, in effect, an auto-critique of their most cherished assumptions based on the wisdom of traditional conservative thought.
This was widely taken to be a heresy at the time, and it instantly earned its author the enduring enmity of the intellectual Left. Yet, in attempting to persuade liberals that ?it is not conducive to the real strength of liberalism that it should occupy the intellectual field alone,? Trilling cited an unexceptionable liberal precedent?John Stuart Mill?s essay on Coleridge:

• Mill, at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan of liberalism should be, ?Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. . . ; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.?

To which Trilling added: ?What Mill meant, of course, was that the intellectual pressure which an opponent like Coleridge could exert would force liberals to examine their position for its weaknesses and complacencies.?
Trilling?s bold project in The Liberal Imagination was anything but an exercise in abstract political theory. It was a keenly felt response to a historical calamity. The liberalism of his own generation?the generation that came of age in the 1930s?had been deeply compromised by its abject surrender to the mythology of Soviet socialism. To extricate liberalism from the seductions of the Soviet myth was no easy task, however. Socialism was the ideal toward which all liberal sentiment was inevitably inclined, and for many liberals of Trilling?s generation the Soviet Union?whatever its faults or failures?still loomed as the most advanced socialist society in the history of the world.

It was, moreover, in the very nature of Stalinism?as the ideology of Soviet apologetics came to be called?to stigmatize every deviation from its own orthodoxies as a sure sign of ?reaction,? and there was nothing that liberals dreaded so much as to be publicly demonized as reactionaries. This is not to say that there were no liberals who harbored doubts about the Soviet ?experiment,? as it was sometimes called. It is to say that, given the immense influence wielded by those loyal to the Stalinist cause, there was often a high price to be paid for the public expression of those doubts, never mind what could be expected to follow from more incendiary accounts of Soviet subversion, terror, and duplicity.

In 1950, the year that The Liberal Imagination was published, many liberals in high places?in the government, the media, and the universities?regarded it as a badge of honor to rally to the defense of Alger Hiss, even after he had been convicted of perjury for lying about his activities as a Soviet agent. Abroad, Stalin?s minions were exerting an immense influence on the political and intellectual life of Western Europe while embarking upon the military conquest of South Korea, and in Russia itself ?Stalin?s murderous paranoia appeared ready to soar once more,? as David Remnick later reported in Lenin?s Tomb (1993), with his contriving of the so-called Doctors? Plot?his farewell act of totalitarian terror.

It was in this historical setting that The Liberal Imagination marked a turning point in American liberal thought?the point at which a chastened liberalism sought to disembarrass itself of the Soviet incubus. Trilling?s was by no means the only or the most politically influential contribution to that endeavor. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.?s The Vital Center, published in 1949 and written in the immediate aftermath of Henry Wallace?s 1948 campaign for the presidency as the candidate of the Progressive Party, struck a powerful blow in the same direction. ?What is the progressive?,? asked Schlesinger in a chapter called ?The Failure of the Left,? and answered as follows:

• The defining characteristic of the progressive, as I shall use the word, is the sentimentality of his approach to politics and culture. He must be distinguished, on the one hand, from the Communist; for the progressive is soft, not hard; he believes himself genuinely concerned with the welfare of individuals. He must be distinguished, on the other, from the radical democrat; for the progressive, by refusing to make room in his philosophy for the discipline of responsibility or for the danger of power, has cut himself off from the usable pragmatic traditions of American radical democracy. He has rejected the pragmatic tradition of the men who, from the Jacksonians to the New Dealers, learned the facts of life through the exercise of power under conditions of accountability. He has rejected the pessimistic tradition of those who, from Hawthorne to Reinhold Niebuhr, warned that power, unless checked by accountability, would corrupt its possessor.

And further:

• His sentimentality has softened up the progressive for Communist permeation and conquest. For the most chivalrous reasons, he cannot believe that ugly facts underlie fair words. However he looks at it, for example, the USSR keeps coming through as a kind of enlarged Brook Farm community, complete with folk dancing in native costume, joyous work in the fields, and progressive kindergartens. Nothing in his system has prepared him for Stalin.

This was certainly audacious for a man with close ties to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party writing in 1949. Yet the liberalism of a ?radical democrat? like Schlesinger was not without its own vein of sentimentality, especially where the New Deal was concerned. It was one thing to speak of ?Communist permeation? in relation to Henry Wallace?s Progressive Party?or, for that matter, in regard to some of the big labor unions, as Schlesinger also did in The Vital Center. But it was quite another thing to acknowledge the reality of Communist penetration of the New Deal itself. On that subject, even a staunch anti-Communist liberal like Schlesinger was not prepared to face the worst, then or later, lest he be seen to ally himself with the forces of ?reaction,? which in this case meant the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Thus, as late as 1967, at a symposium organized by Partisan Review at Columbia University, Schlesinger was still attempting to deny the importance of the Communists-in-government issue by drawing a specious distinction between what had occurred in the New York intellectual world in the 1930s ?the focus of Trilling?s critique of liberalism in The Liberal Imagination?and what had befallen the ?pragmatic? New Deal liberals in Washington in the same period, on which subject Schlesinger had himself become our principal mythologist. In regard to the politics of the New Deal, anyway, Schlesinger clearly had no interest in invoking the views of any conservative opponent as a means of forcing liberals, as Trilling had put it, ?to examine their position for its weaknesses and complacencies.? Reinhold Niebuhr was himself, after all, a bona fide liberal?and Niebuhr was about as ?conservative? as Schlesinger was prepared to go in his attempt to reform the liberalism of his day.

By the late 1960s, however, the once potent moral influence of anti-Communist liberalism had been shattered by the radical movement that erupted in response to the Vietnam War. Between the Stalinism of the 1930s and the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, there were many differences in style and tactics, to be sure, but they were alike in one essential respect: in their power to persuade liberals to betray their professed ideals of liberty, democracy, and the rule of law by worshipping at the altars of illiberal gods. Stalin may have been discredited (though rehabilitating some of the shabbiest reputations spawned by the Stalinism of the 1930s came to occupy an important place in the politics and culture of the radical movement in the 1960s). Yet, as Paul Hollander demonstrated in his classic study Political Pilgrims (fourth edition, 1998), Western intellectuals in the 1960s found plenty of alternatives to the Soviet model. Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, among others, proved to be equally compelling icons for a new generation of liberals and progressives as susceptible to the totalitarian temptation as their elder counterparts had been in the 1930s. Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd expressed this dour brand of sentimentalizing illiberalism with inimitable clarity in 1966: ?we also discovered that we felt empathy for those more fully ?other? members of the other side, spokesmen for the Communist world in Prague and Moscow, Peking and Hanoi. After all, we call ourselves in some sense revolutionaries. So do they. After all, we identify with the poor and oppressed. So do they.? As Mr. Hollander comments, ?the most striking paradox in the political judgment of intellectuals involves the contrast between their views of their own society and those they designate ? as lands of promise or historical fulfillment.?

Trilling?s project to reform liberalism by calling upon it to perform an auto-critique of its pieties and commonplaces was effectively buried in the culture wars that came out of the 1960s counterculture. But then, so was Arthur Schlesinger?s more narrowly conceived political project to reform liberalism by separating it from the simplistic illusions of progressivism buried on the same ideological battleground. ?It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify,? Trilling wrote in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, and no greater proof of that assessment could have been imagined than the nomination of a simple-minded liberal like George McGovern as the Democratic Party?s candidate for president in 1972?a candidate who answered to Schlesinger?s idea of the progressive mind in virtually every detail. As a consequence of the politics and culture of the 1960s radical movement, liberalism was itself reduced to sentiments that were now able to express themselves ?only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.?

As a guide to what, in the last decade of the twentieth century, these liberal ?mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas? have come to, consider the philosopher Richard Rorty?s reflections in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). Rorty, widely celebrated for his gently nihilistic ?pragmatism,? offers what he calls the ?reformist Left? a program for future renewal. Nothing more opposed to Trilling?s call for liberalism to embrace an ?awareness of complexity and difficulty? can be imagined. In Rorty?s updated version of the progressive vision, there are no complexities or difficulties to be entertained. All politics is once again painlessly reduced to a highly simplified Left and Right, with the Left always right?morally right, even when politically wrong?and the Right always wrong, morally and politically. Mill on Coleridge remains a closed book.

The contrast between The Liberal Imagination and Achieving Our Country was made especially piquant by the fact that ?as Rorty was eager to tell us?he was himself born into the political and intellectual milieu that did much to shape Trilling?s thought:

• My parents were loyal fellow-travelers of the Communist Party right up through 1932, the year after I was born. In that year my father ran a front organization called the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford (the Communist Party?s candidates for president and vice-president). My parents broke with the party after realizing the extent to which it was run from Moscow, and so I did not get to read the Daily Worker when I was a boy. By 1935 the Worker was printing cartoons of my father as a trained seal, catching fish thrown by William Randolph Hearst. But my parents did subscribe to the organ of Norman Thomas? Socialist Party, The Call, as well as those of the DeLeonite Socialist Labor Party and the Shachtmanite Socialist Workers? Party. I plowed through these papers, convinced that doing so would teach me how to think about my country and its politics.

Rorty continues:

• As a teenager, I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling published in Partisan Review?partly, perhaps, because I had been bounced on their knees as a baby. My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader who was assassinated a few years later. That same party, I have since discovered, was attended not only by the Hooks and the Trillings, but by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had just broken with the Communist Party and was desperately afraid of being liquidated by Stalin?s hit men.

All of which is quite interesting, of course. Growing up on what Rorty calls ?the anti-Communist reformist Left? had meant, among other things, that he never became a Communist fellow traveler himself.
It also meant, in his case, that he takes a very dim view of what he calls ?the Foucauldian Left,? if only because it has, as he writes, ?little interest in designing new social experiments.? In fact, Foucault and his many followers have shown themselves only too eager to engage in ?new social experiments.? Foucault himself never met a revolutionary piety he didn?t like. Maoism got the Foucault seal of approval, as did the Ayatollah Khomeini?s Islamic fundamentalism. Foucault remained a staunch supporter of that Muslim fanatic even after his followers set about murdering thousands of Iranian citizens. In 1978, looking back to the postwar period, Foucault asked: ?What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin?s USSR and Truman?s America?? There were also, of course, Foucault?s multifarious ?social experiments? with sado-masochism in gay bars and bathhouses not to mention his enthusiastic ?experiments? with LSD and other hallucinogens. Perhaps Foucault?s ?new social experiments? were not to Rorty?s taste, but it is disingenuous at best to pretend that the problem with that immensely influential figure was political quietism.

Indeed, Rorty?s experience of the ?reformist Left? seems to have left him with a permanent incapacity for critical judgment about anything having to do with its social goals. What those goals amount to, in this account, was little more than a vaguely utopian version of the welfare state combined with the imperatives of 1990s-style political correctness: what Chairman Mao referred to as ?the centralization of correct ideas.? Yet Rorty has nothing to say about either the woeful failures of the welfare state or about about the coercive measures needed to perfect the kind of politically correct society he enthusiastically endorses. As a consequence, we are left with the impression that Achieving Our Country is neither a serious exercise in liberal pragmatism nor an attempt at political analysis, but something else: a historical romance.

About the actual history of the political Left in this country, Rorty does indeed have a very romantic?not to say distorted ?view. In a passage that seems to call for something like a revival of the 1930s Popular Front, he implores us to ?abandon the leftist-versus-liberal distinction, along with the other residues of Marxism that clutter up our vocabulary,? and thus ?drop the term ?Old Left? as a name for the Americans who called themselves ?socialists? between 1945 and 1964.? As for the old Communist Party stalwarts, Rorty asks us to ?remember that individual members of that party worked heroically, and made very painful sacrifices, in the hope of helping our country to achieve its promise. Many Marxists, even those who spent decades apologizing for Stalin, helped change our country for the better by helping to change its laws.?

For Rorty, ?having been ?on the Left???never mind which Left?is to have received the political equivalent of a mandate from heaven, and among its saintly recipients he lists Angela Davis and Jesse Jackson along with Irving Howe and Arthur Schlesinger?though not, of course, Lionel Trilling. He also has some kind words for such ?socially useful thinkers? (really, they are pampered academic radicals) as Cornel West, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton, whom he grandly forgives for regarding themselves as Marxists. Those whom he consigns to the ?reformist Left? version of the outer darkness make an interesting list, too?Calvin Coolidge, Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Robert Taft, and William Buckley. Well, as Trilling said, ?It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify.?

As might be expected from this cast of mind, in which an intellectually exhausted liberalism looks to radicalism in its most extreme manifestations as the only means of renewing its own vitality, Rorty reserves his highest praise for the uproars of the 1960s.

• America will always owe an enormous amount to the rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972. We do not know what our country would be like today had that rage not been felt. But we can be pretty certain that it would be a much worse place than it is.

In this philosopher?s considered judgment, ?the New Left may have saved us from losing our moral identity.? If the New Leftists ?had never taken to the streets,? he writes, ?America might no longer be a constitutional democracy.? And in the name of what ideas or ideals does this champion of the ?reformist Left? look to the future?? ?Among these ideals,? writes Rorty, ?are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed, only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by their results. ? When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place.? Yes, and the state will ?wither away,? as the Marxists kept promising us, bourgeois capitalism will slide into the ?dustbin of history,? replaced by the promised utopia of freedom, virtue, and liberal unanimity on every issue.
Rorty?s pathetic exercise in nostalgia for radical pieties old and new reminds us of the intellectual bankruptcy that has overtaken liberal thought and of liberalism?s betrayal of its own vaunted values and goals. It is with a view to reexamining the historical sources of liberalism?s current impasse and its implications for conservative alternatives that the editors of The New Criterion have organized the present discussion. The Betrayal of Liberalism is at once a critique of the liberal legacy and an acknowledgement of the pervasive authority that liberal ideas and liberal programs continue to exert on the politics and culture of bourgeois democracies the world over, including our own. As the subtitle of this volume suggests, one major theme in the betrayal of liberalism is coercion: the tendency of liberalism to pervert freedom in its campaign to impose an ideology of virtue. Of course, this is not a new development. In Du contrat social (1762)?a bible for one strand of liberal thought?Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously opposed what he called ?the general will? to the particular wills of individual men and women. ?Whoever refuses to obey the general will,? Rousseau wrote in one of his most chilling passages, ?shall be compelled to it by the whole body: this in fact only forces him to be free.? Establishing the reign of virtue that Rousseau envisioned was not for the faint-hearted. ?Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual ? into a part of a much greater whole; ? of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.? St. Just and Robespierre were among the first to act on Rousseau?s grandiose plan. They were not the last. How often in the twentieth century have social and moral architects seized upon Rousseau?s words as a license for illiberalism or worse!

One lesson to be learned from the betrayal of liberalism is that the other side of utopia is a tendency to totalitarianism, ?soft? or ?hard? as the case may be. Richard Rorty may dream about ?participatory democracy and the end of capitalism.? But the ?ironic liberalism? he champions is much more likely to foster intellectual conformity and a stultifying regimen of political correctness in which every aspect of life is subjected to ideological scrutiny. Not for nothing did Lenin observe that ?what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything.? One cannot be too careful if the object is to force people to be free. The sentimental idealization of the ?rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972? overlooks the impulse to tyranny that lurked beneath much of its emancipationist rhetoric. Herbert Marcuse?neo-Marxist radical, apostle of libidinal utopia, countercultural guru? epitomized this phenomenon with his doctrine of ?repressive tolerance.? According to Marcuse, apparently democratic institutions such as freedom of assembly and free speech are really deceptive alibis for oppressive state power. Genuinely ?liberating tolerance,? he wrote with Orwellian verve, ?would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.? Indeed, Marcuse makes it clear that what he wants is ?not ?equal? but more representation of the Left,? and he blithely sanctions ?extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.?

• Different opinions and ?philosophies? can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ?marketplace of ideas? is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ?end of ideology,? the false consciousness has become the general consciousness?from the government down to its last objects.

No wonder the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski concluded that Marcuse?s entire system ?depends on replacing the tyranny of logic by a police tyranny. ? The Marcusian union of Eros and Logos can only be realized in the form of a totalitarian state, established and governed by force; the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.?
The casual brutality of Marcuse?s program of ?liberating tolerance? is breathtaking. But it would be a mistake to think that such fantasies of control are confined to academic radicals who, whatever their status as cultural icons, are without real political influence. The liberal betrayal of liberalism is also evident throughout the policies and attitudes that constitute political correctness, ?diversity training,? and the like. Despite the condign ridicule, parody, and satire to which political correctness has been subjected, its dictates are increasingly felt in schools and colleges, in the workplace, and in governmental offices. Wherever one discovers a publicly bruited ?commitment to diversity,? one can be sure that policies designed to assure lockstep conformity are not far behind.

Consider, to take just one example, the so-called ?politics of meaning.? Coined by the psychologist and left-wing activist Michael Lerner, the phrase was catapulted into the limelight by Hillary Rodham Clinton in a speech she delivered at the University of Texas in 1993. ?We need,? Mrs. Clinton declared, ?a new politics of meaning. ? We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.?

?The politics of meaning? is the perfect PC slogan: seamlessly combining nebulousness and the aroma of virtue, it specifies nothing but can be enlisted to justify anything. According to Mr. Lerner, ?most middle-income people? are in ?deep pain in their daily lives.? His prescription to alleviate this pain is one that his disciple Hillary Clinton also embraces. It centers on insinuating a ?caring? government more deeply into every aspect of people?s lives (and their pocketbooks). ?Every workplace,? Mr. Lerner tells us in a policy paper that deeply impressed Mrs. Clinton, ?should be mandated to create a mission statement explaining its function and what conception of the common good it is serving and how it is doing so. ? The Department of Labor should organize this process and publish the result.?

If Mr. Lerner has his way, the Department of Labor is going to be awfully busy. To combat ?stress,? he suggests that the Department of Labor should initiate an annual ?Occupational Stress Day? and that ?every community should be mandated to create a set of public hearings about stress and work and how work could be reorganized to make conditions less stressful.? Mr. Lerner is deeply fond of the word ?mandate??i.e., force, require, coerce. ?The Department of Labor should mandate that every employer allow workers to elect an Occupational Safety and Health Committee empowered to require changes in the organization of work to increase workers? safety and health, including mental health.? And again: ?Federal legislation should be passed to prevent any company from moving or closing its plants in a given area without first making a social-environmental impact report on the human consequences. Companies would be fined, up to confiscatory levels, for those moves that negatively affect the health of the community.? One recalls Tocqueville?s melancholy remarks about ?What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.? Democratic despotism, he says, ?would degrade men without tormenting them,? covering ?the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. ? Such a power does not destroy, ? but it enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.?

It would be nice to be able to dismiss Michael Lerner as one more academic totalitarian. What makes this impossible is the fact that he is taken seriously by people like Hillary Clinton: a woman who, although unelected to any office, managed to create untold havoc in the U.S. health care system and who will doubtless be shopping around for other opportunities to intrude herself on the public even if (as seems likely as of this writing) she fails in her bid to win a New York Senate seat. ?Federal legislation should be passed ??; ?the Department of Labor should mandate ??; ?every community should be mandated ??; ?Companies would be fined, up to confiscatory levels. ?? These are phrases dear to the hearts of the Michael Lerners and Hillary Clintons of the world. Such overbearing meddlesomeness is not exclusively an American failing, of course. One thinks of the recent proposal made by Jack Straw, the British Home Secretary, who is advocating legislation that would allow the government to incarcerate indefinitely people who are deemed ?pathological? even though they have not committed any crime.

Notwithstanding the manifest failures of liberal practice, especially in the economic, cultural, and moral disasters of the welfare state, liberal ideology remains our dominant political ethos. It is institutionalized in our schools and universities. It governs the politics and culture of the mainstream media, and it rules virtually without challenge in the mass-entertainment industry. In arts institutions, in the churches, in the philanthropic foundations, and in a great many agencies of government, this liberal ethos is dominant. So much so, alas, that many more of its fundamental tenets are now silently taken for granted even among its conservative critics than is usually acknowledged, especially among supposedly conservative candidates for public office.

Indeed, nothing is more remarkable about the fate of liberalism at the dawn of a new century than the fact that its institutional life continues to prosper even as its governing ideas and assumptions prove less and less workable as social and economic policy and more and more inimical to the liberties and opportunities in the name of which they are advanced. One name for this circumstance?this disconnection between institutionalized policies and the bankruptcy of the principles that inform them?is decadence. Whatever signs of hope optimists find in our culture at the present moment ?our prosperity, our technological prowess, the global hegemony of many American ideas and products?it is difficult to deny that our liberal culture is currently in a deeply decadent state. And it is because of the increasing disparity between the claims of liberal theory and the dismal record of liberal practice that a reexamination of liberalism itself is imperative. Tracing the betrayal of liberalism from Rousseau and John Stuart Mill through its expression in law, religion, foreign policy, the writing of history, and the relation between liberalism and totalitarianism, the following essays are a contribution to this task. It is indicative of the situation of liberalism in contemporary culture that these essays also constitute a meditation on the future of an illusion: the illusion that genuine virtue is synonymous with liberal ideology, and the corollary illusion that any criticism of liberalism is synonymous with unthinking reaction.








Posted for discussion purposes only.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

That liberals, at this same time, nominated a man who prefered that America lose a war is somewhat troubling to conservatives like me, and makes us more than just a little suspicious when they are not more honest about this all the time.

Nixon intended to lose the war too, and he did lose the war, he just wasn't honest about what he intended to do.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

I simply hold that whatever was born in, or created if you will, in a fourth turn (ie., winter) becomes the new paradigm, the new rules that govern. In the previous fourth, the U.S. emerged primarily as the leader of the free world (with 70% of the budget designated to foreign policy) and secondarily as a growing welfare state. This was the new liberalism.

Crisies don't change the liberal paradigm. The new liberal paradigm appears in the awakening. It defeats the conservative paradigm in the Crisis and is partially accepted by conservatives in the High. The progressive ideology was adopted by liberals during the 1896-1917 Awakening, triumphed during the 1929-46 Crisis and was partially accepted by conservatives during the 1946-64 High (they accepted big military, but not big domestic government).

Similarly the new liberalism (Abolition) appeared in the 1822-44 Awakening, triumphed in the 1860-77 Crisis, and was partially accepted by conservatives in the 1877-1896 High (former confederates accepted emancipation, but not racial equality).

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

That liberals, at this same time, nominated a man who prefered that America lose a war is somewhat troubling to conservatives like me, and makes us more than just a little suspicious when they are not more honest about this all the time.

Nixon intended to lose the war too, and he did lose the war, he just wasn't honest about what he intended to do.

No, he did not. He was attempting to do the same thing we did in Korea. But, alas, like your charge that only conservatives undermine the First Amendment, these sorts of arguments are completely subjective in nature and not scientifically provable by any stretch of the imagination. Campaign Finance Reform is clearly an abridgment of free speech. Yet liberals are more than willing to subvert the First Amendment for something else that they want.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

No, he did not. He was attempting to do the same thing we did in Korea.

This is ridiculous. In Korea our troops were still there, and Eisenhower was hinting at using nukes, an escalation that the other side could not counter. Eisenhower offered the other side the choice of a draw, which was a good deal, so they took it.

In Vietnam, Nixon had nothing wiht with to bargain. He had already withdrawn the troops. This signals to the other side that we were leaving. Nixon wanted to control the perceptions of his withdrawal, he didn't want it to look like the US was cutting and running, although that's what we did, and so he pumped up the bombing to get a "peace agreement". Apparently it worked on you.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

This is ridiculous...

And so is equating World War II with the capture of a drug dealer.

Originally Posted by William J. Lemmiwinks

HELLO, HELLO, EVERYONE, I HAVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE.

I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT.

MARC LAMB IS AN ANAL SPHINCTER OF THE FIRST ORDER.

Hey sh*thead, congratulations, you're on "ignore".

Aw, gee, this just won't do. I'm sorry, I really am. Is there thing I could possibly do or say that'll get me back into your good graces? I promise I won't call you a jerk anymore. This is awful, I'm already on Rush's "ignore list." And he keeps adding all these folks like Maxine, Sanford and Titus to his "Marc Lamb ignore list," too! MSM just got the Marc Lamb "ignore" treatment and no one has heard from or seen him since.

Gosh, I just can't handle being airbrushed outta life like this. Surely you can find it in your heart to forgive me, sir? :oops:

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

And so is equating World War II with the capture of a drug dealer.

It sure is, but I'm not equating the two. You are perceiving that I am. I don't understand many of your perceptions. I am apparently unable to transmit information is a manner that comprehensible to you. I certainly have trouble understanding you. There seems to be no point in continuing a discussion.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

And so is equating World War II with the capture of a drug dealer.

It sure is, but I'm not equating the two. You are perceiving that I am.

You stated that "by weighting the events I simply introduced my own personal bias upon the data," so you seek to avoid that pitfall. Yet you introduce a bias anyway. You do so by defining all the necessary parameters of what constitutes a relavent "political event," and how that "event" is defined itself, and then by defining the parameters of how that event is classified as liberal or conservative.

Frankly I find your methods of defining those parameters to be sadly lacking at best, at worse they are offensive, trite and typically partisan. How in the world you would think that I would just glibly accept that trashing First Amendment freedoms is an inherent part of my conservative nature is a bit beyond me. And yet you dare to claim that most people are conservative, while never stopping to consider that if this were true, as you define it, there would be no First Amendment in the first place! Never mind that it would actually survive the test of time.

I do not find it the least bit surprising that the guy who just accused me of supporting Trotskyites ended up airbrushing what I write from this website. It is a time-honored tradition among those on the left to invoke the Nonpersons Act whenever they get hot under the collar. And then these so-called "lovers of tolerance" have the nerve to turn around and accuse "conservatives" of posing a danger to Free Speech.

So forget the "weight" problem altogether, I agree, adding any more "bias" into your method of discerning political cycles, that is heavy with bias already, doesn't make any sense.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

[To Mike Alexander]

Frankly I find your methods of defining those parameters to be sadly lacking at best, at worse they are offensive, trite and typically partisan.

Perfect projection. Simply beautiful. One can easily visualize you staring at a mirror here.

How in the world you would actually think that I, as a conservative,

And has been discussed a number of times already, it is a matter of serious dispute whether you and yours even qualify as "conservatives." You and your fellow Bush supporters are Progressives. If it is held that a conservative is by definition a Traditionalist, then a conservative cannot also be a Progressive (and thus cannot be a Bushbot). You and your type who voted for Carter in 1980 and only came around to Reagan in 1984 are almost always afflicted with this dishonest form of Progressivism which cloaks itself in conservative garb and draws false distinctions with other Progressives. Not only do you habitually give Christianity a black eye at this site, but conservatism as well.

would just glibly accept that trashing First Amendment freedoms is an inherent part of my conservative nature is a bit beyond me. And yet you actually dare to claim that most people are conservative, while never stopping to consider that if this were actually true, as you define it, there would be no First Amendment in the first place! Never mind that it would actually survive the test of time.

Nothing but typically inconsequential gibberish above if conservatives by definition cannot also be Progressives. If a Progressive cannot be a conservative, then you cannot be a conservative.

I do not find it the least bit surprising that the guy who just accused me of supporting Trotskyites ended up airbrushing what I write from this website. It is a time-honored tradition among those on the left to invoke the Nonpersons Act whenever they get hot under the collar. And then these so-called "lovers of tolerance" have the nerve to turn around and accuse "conservatives" of posing a danger to Free Speech.

If you support neoconics, then you in fact support Trotskyites. That is just a fact so why continue to argue about it? The rest of the passage above is just more bizarre ranting (focused deliberately on irrelevancies intended as distractions) and I cannot address it because I could not bring myself to finish reading it.

So forget the "weight" problem altogether, I agree, adding any more "bias" into your method of discerning political cycles, that is heavy with bias already, doesn't make any sense.

I am sure that Mike will give you a big "okey-doke" here.

"Monsieur Douchebag, what would you like on your salad?"

I do not consider Mike Alexander's personal "bias" to be a problem at all. It is that he claims his methods excludes a bias when in fact they do not.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

You stated that "by weighting the events I simply introduced my own personal bias upon the data," so you seek to avoid that pitfall. Yet you introduce a bias anyway. You do so by defining all the necessary parameters of what constitutes a relavent "political event," and how that "event" is defined itself, and then by defining the parameters of how that event is classified as liberal or conservative.

You don't understand, you don't even try to understand. The quote you give refers to the example of the composers. Question: exactly what bias was I trying to avoid in that example. Go back and read it. What was I trying to show? If you can do that then I can address the rest of the post. You are way, way off mark, you apparently don't have the remotest idea what the L-C stuff is about.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

That liberals, at this same time, nominated a man who prefered that America lose a war is somewhat troubling to conservatives like me, and makes us more than just a little suspicious when they are not more honest about this all the time.

Nixon intended to lose the war too, and he did lose the war, he just wasn't honest about what he intended to do.

No, he did not. He was attempting to do the same thing we did in Korea. But, alas, like your charge that only conservatives undermine the First Amendment, these sorts of arguments are completely subjective in nature and not scientifically provable by any stretch of the imagination. Campaign Finance Reform is clearly an abridgment of free speech. Yet liberals are more than willing to subvert the First Amendment for something else that they want.

I agree with Marc about Vietnam-- it was obvious to me even back then that the U.S. was attempting to bring about a Korea-type solution there, and were completely perplexed as to why it wasn't working. The reason, of course, is that both Vietnam and America were by then in an Awakening, not a High. Korea worked in a 1T because it served to cement the post-WW2 World Order, which is what one would expect in a High. Vietnam didn't because North and South Vietnam were fighting, either for or against, a social revolution (Communism), while here at home Americans were fighting -- again, for or against --a social revolution of their own (the CR). And as happens so often in Awakenings, both sets of revolutionaries won.

I don't see how Campaign Finance Reform violates Freedom of Speech, unless you accept the idea that Corporations are "persons" with "rights" to be protected like real people. (That may be the way the Constitution is currently interpreted, but I don't like or accept it as fact). It is true, I'd agree, that CFR would also restrict the activities of special-interest lobbying groups that support liberal causes, as well as those that support the interest of corporate America. Oh, well...we can't have it both ways. IMHO, it is far more important to check the power of corporations and return government to We The People...at least in the early Fourth Turning.