Do people overrate how liberal and progressive today is compared to other times? (economic, captive)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Things get a lot more complicated than something that can be put on a simple liberal/conservative spectrum. My sense is that a lot of economic populism in the past was a product of social factors that don't really exist anymore.
For example, where would we find elements of old-fashioned economic populism today? I'd argue that kind of culture is strongest in insular communities like Amish groups, where there is a very localist "share and share alike" philosophy at work. These are people who are naturally wary of modernity, and mostly haven't "outsourced" their lives to modern globalized corporate systems.
"Prairie socialism" developed in Canada and parts of the Upper Midwest out of what I suspect was a similar impulse - groups of like-minded people who lived in smaller, often isolated communities whose economic ideas arose from their circumstances. The notion of "every man for himself" in an environment with harsh winters and variable crop prices was insane to many people in those areas, and was forcefully rejected in favor of something more suitable. The grange movement had some similar elements.
That could be seen as economic "leftism," but that's not a very useful label without considering the background. Early Israeli kibbutzes were famously communistic in nature, but to look at them in American left-right terms is perhaps to miss the point.
In the wider American culture of today, there is generally not a lot of faith between individual citizens, and many people have more contact and experience with corporations than they do with their own neighbors. In a mobile society where people are expected to chase job "opportunities" around the country, the idea of being "rooted" to one place for life is rather foreign.
This has the effect of empowering corporate entities relative to individual communities, and what might be seen as community interests (which are often adverse to corporate interests).
I also largely dismiss the distinction many people try to make between some notion of "pure" capitalism and what they see as a corrupted "crony" capitalism. I think it is beside the point. In a modern globalized economic system such as ours, corporate and government interests will naturally interlock and reinforce one another. It doesn't matter if the government were somehow made "smaller," corporate interests would simply replicate the structures useful to them by other means. In order to oppose that, you'd need collective action at the community level - like the Amish - which is simply not possible in most of modern America.
I was thinking more about the conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower vs. the conservatism of today. Once upon a time, conservatives were pretty progressive. They believed in the future of America.
The conservatism of Eisenhower might not have passed the "conservative" muster of his time. This is a man continued the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt Democrats, sent U.S. troops to integrate Little Rock's Central High school, inserted the federal government into state and local education unseen since the enactment of the Morrill Act, and last but not least helped to derail the likes of Joe McCarthy. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Eisenhower's name is rarely if ever invoked by the GOP.
By lumpenproleteriat, I mean those individuals who cannot muster the foresight and/or responsibility to plan ahead and assume full responsibility for their actions. Every society has them, and I know from firsthand experience that many of them are quite adept at "working the system", rather than assuming their justifiable share of the load. Local control is much better-suited to identifying them and "encouraging: them to face the same hard choices as the rest of us, and the charges of "racism, etc." were fare more credible in an earlier day.
That is precisely why the "progressive mentality", in the absence of the direct incentives offered by a market economy, seeks to build a larger clientele, and a larger bureaucracy.
By lumpenproleteriat, I mean those individuals who cannot muster the foresight and/or responsibility to plan ahead and assume full responsibility for their actions. Every society has them, and I know from firsthand experience that many of them are quite adept at "working the system", rather than assuming their justifiable share of the load. Local control is much better-suited to identifying them and "encouraging: them to face the same hard choices as the rest of us, and the charges of "racism, etc." were fare more credible in an earlier day.
That is precisely why the "progressive mentality", in the absence of the direct incentives offered by a market economy, seeks to build a larger clientele, and a larger bureaucracy.
You just can't discuss the topic at hand can you?
THIS IS THE HISTORY FORUM, NOT POLITICS AND OTHER CONTROVERSIES.
Now if you would like to compare and contrast different eras in American history as it relates to liberalism and progressivism PLEASE, do so.
THIS IS THE HISTORY FORUM, NOT POLITICS AND OTHER CONTROVERSIES.
Now if you would like to compare and contrast different eras in American history as it relates to liberalism and progressivism PLEASE, do so.
As I have previously pointed out, very few economic conservatives still embrace the doctrine of absolute laissez-faire; the development of a fully post-industrial, service-based society, and the multiplicity of venues in which a mature economy operates has muffled the most strident opposition, save at the fringes like the so-called "Tea Party", which ideologues such as yourself continue to incorrectly demonize as the conservative mainstream.
Furthermore, you repeatedly refuse to differentiate between the "Classical liberalism", which emerged during the Enlightenment, and the not-so-liberal "progressivism" which -- as demonstrated by your attempt to limit the scope of the exchange -- is nothing more than a form of the censorship you profess to oppose.
In other words, it only depends on whose ox is gored. If you want to discuss the devolution of Classical liberalism into "progressivism", and eventually into Fascism, you need only go as far as the degeneration of the French Revolution into the Terror. The phenomenon is as natural as the progression of fruit from green, to ripe, to rotten.
What most are calling liberal and progressive is immoral and apathetic
If what I just said were false we should not see black lynch mobs and the highest prison population on earth
We did not get rid of evil we just switched costumes
Last edited by Huckleberry3911948; 04-14-2014 at 02:25 PM..
Reading the OP and many follow up posts have proved to be quite amusing. At this time, the USA is farther to the left, in virtually all aspects of society, than it has been at any time in it's history, and that is exactly why we have so many problems; the utter failure of liberalism and leftist ideology. To many of us on the right, Barack Obama is viewed as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, our first elected Communist president, whose goals since his childhood have been to tear down and destroy our society, and then remake it in the image of the old Soviet Union.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.