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I never did answer Rubi3's question. But in light of your post I think that this would be the proper response.
If you had a very long bench and sitting on that bench from left to right you had Eugene Debs, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Barak Obama, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hover, and Calvin Coolidge, and then started to add people like, Ron or Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Obama would indeed be the ultra left.
After WWII there was a huge nonpartisan progressive movement dedicated to building local and national infrastructure. That's when the interstate highway system was built, many municipal water and sewer systems were massively expanded, and irrigation projects turned much of the west into a garden. The future of America looked bright and people were interested in building that future.
The current political climate is content to live in the decaying past, unwilling to even maintain what we have much less building for the future.
After WWII there was a huge nonpartisan progressive movement dedicated to building local and national infrastructure. That's when the interstate highway system was built, many municipal water and sewer systems were massively expanded, and irrigation projects turned much of the west into a garden. The future of America looked bright and people were interested in building that future.
If anyone needs a comparison between the latest incarnation of liberalism and the liberal/leftism of let's say Franklin Roosevelt take time to watch the PBS documentary on the building the Grand Coulee Dam.
Despite all the hoopla about gay marriage and the general public's change of heart towards the subject I feel like we live in an essentially conservative and right wing time. Nationalism is growing in Europe, libertarian conservatism is growing all over the West and generally speaking the environmental movement and socialist movements have both failed and big business has won. With the exception of the Catholics who are making some huge leaps to rescue their image religions are becoming more fundamentalist and reactionary whether it's militant Christianity in Africa, Hindu-castepitalism in India or the ever present and familiar Wahhabi genocidal maniacs.
I don't see the early 21st century as being a tolerant or enlightened time, I see it as being indifferent on one hand and fundamentalist on the other depending on who and where you are.
I think when it comes to race, sex and societies view on women, we are living in a very liberal time. We have a black President and a woman might win in 2016. Couples are living together and having children outside marriage. Gender roles are reversed for many families. Women are often the breadwinners.
This is an inherently unanswerable question since it is relative to a particular era. Use the 1930s as an example: economic left-wing politics were more acceptable while the social norms of today would have been unimaginable even to strident liberals at the time.
I never did answer Rubi3's question. But in light of your post I think that this would be the proper response.
If you had a very long bench and sitting on that bench from left to right you had Eugene Debs, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Barak Obama, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hover, and Calvin Coolidge, and then started to add people like, Ron or Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Obama would indeed be the ultra left.
FDR was every bit as much of a patrician as the two Bushes; he was probably not as left-leaning in the "activist" sense as his Republican cousin. The difference was that he was a much more effective communicator, and he did a masterful job of downplaying his disability at a time when the public didn't always accept such things. But he had his "dirty laundry" in his misguided attempts at regulation (NRA) and tarnished himself further by trying to tamper with the Supreme Court.
Still, he saw the threat of European totalitarianism early on, and overcame misguided isolationism at a critical point in our history; I'll rank him high among our Presidents for that, but for that alone.
I never did answer Rubi3's question. But in light of your post I think that this would be the proper response.
If you had a very long bench and sitting on that bench from left to right you had Eugene Debs, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Barak Obama, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hover, and Calvin Coolidge, and then started to add people like, Ron or Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Obama would indeed be the ultra left.
Which could, in turn, be "re-balanced" by the likes of Al Franken, Dennis Kucinich and Nancy Pelosi
Despite all the hoopla about gay marriage and the general public's change of heart towards the subject I feel like we live in an essentially conservative and right wing time.
There's that old standby Lefty scare-word "right-wing". Conservatives are never depicted as people of intellect such as George Will, Eric Hoffer and William Buckley. In the image peddled to the young and impressionable (with a lot of in-lockstep help from the NEA), all conservatives are brown-shirted Fascists or ignorant provincials. "Can you say "teabagger" -- boys and girls?" -- or do you have the honesty to investigate true, rooted-in-the-Enlightenment "Classical" liberalism? -- (no capitalizing necessary -- this is realpolitik rather than blind doctrines and ideology).
You might also take the time to learn that one of the formative groups of the Libertarian Party consisted of nearly half of the campus conservative group Young Americans for Freedom, led by the likes of the late Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, who walked out of that group's National Convention in 1969 rather than rubber-stamping a traditionalist God, country and blind obedience platform.
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Nationalism is growing in Europe, libertarian conservatism is growing all over the West and generally speaking the environmental movement and socialist movements have both failed and big business has won.
Up until the late Sixties, what was called the "conservation" movement was headed mostly by mainstream educators and business leaders who understood even then that the consumption patterns of the day could not continue ad infinitum. Much of that same thinking underlies the present redevelopment of alternative fuels and transportation infrastructure -- centered on the railroads and natural gas -- both of which were thought to be dying industrial sectors in the Fifties, plus the original and most adaptable "biofuel" -- ethanol. But the Lefty ideologues of the day dismissed such concerns -- until they could be hijacked and turned into an attack on individual freedoms.
"Big business" ??? -- another simple scare-word that goes all the way back to Great Grandpa's day. What we have today is not real free enterprise, but "crony capitalism" -- a bastardization made possible only through the unholy alliance between the near-monopoly on absolute power originating within the Beltway, and an unnatural concentration of economic influence fueled in large part by Madison Avenue's pandering to the pseudo-"trendy" and the security-obsessed (and their dollars) who swallowed the lies of the Nanny-State in one gulp.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 04-11-2014 at 05:42 AM..
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