Do you remember when "liberal" was a dirty word?
I’m not referring to the 1980s campaign by conservative Republicans to make "liberal" radioactive. The era I’m thinking about goes back before the Newt’s "Republican Revolution." I’m thinking about a time some of you are too young to remember. I’m thinking about the 1960s when progressives viewed liberals with contempt.
I had just fallen off the turnip truck - a naive undergraduate at a State university. I was truly apolitical. When my rhetoric instructor assigned a paper on the Vietnam War, I left class wondering, "When was that war fought and who fought it?" If I had read the front page or editorials I would have realized the Vietnam war was ongoing and my country was a primary player. But back then I read only the comics and sports.
My university taught me much - history, logic, and critical thinking. And there was politics. Civil Rights legislation had just been passed but enforcement was lacking. The women’s movement was growing. The Vietnam war was becoming less popular. I left the sidelines to march against our government’s policies.
Progressives were being assassinated. Liberal Lyndon Johnson was now in charge. LBJ declared war on poverty and passed the 1964 Civil Right law. But he also got us deep into a war that would kill million of innocent people and tarnish our international image.
As my mentor explained to me:
LBJ is a liberal, not a progressive. Liberals believe wholeheartedly in the existing system. Their idea of change is one of changing the people on the top, not changing how the system fundamentally operates. They see the solution as getting "better people" running the same system rather than a "better system" for the people. Any change you get from a liberal will be minimal and incremental.
Now we have liberal Obama and I’m afraid his fate (and ours) will parallel LBJ’s.
Expanding not ending a war half way around the planet. Was there a campaign promise about bringing the troops home?
Minimal changes in financial rules - see Bob Swern’s excellent diary and references on this. Geithner and Summers fixing the economy?
From White House guest lists to torture reports, the transparent becomes opaque. No penalties for upper class and high government law breakers.
Today there is another diary on the recommended list. One about Obama appointing a former Monsanto lobbyist to the FDA. More fox in the hen houses.
We should not have expected anything different. One does not get to be a Presidential nominee of a major party by biting the corporate hand that feeds them. While we little folk and our web based fund raising played a role, the big IOU is Goldman Sachs. We should not forget that.