Why I知 Not a Liberal
Why I’m Not a Liberal
7.15.14 ~ by Robin Marie Averbeck
To many liberals, injustice is a product of misunderstanding, the result of faceless processes that no one really benefits from.
I was standing in the National Mall, surrounded by nearly a quarter million people, when I realized I wasn’t a liberal. I had come to Washington, along with 215,000 others, to participate in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event inspired by Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor.” The festival reached its height as the spectators were treated to a video montage of fire-breathing pundits from all the major news networks denouncing their political opponents. The message was clear: Those who tell you there are fundamental differences between Americans that are worth getting emphatically angry about are lying to you. This divided America — an America that contains people with radically different values and radically different ideas of what a just, moral society looks like — does not exist. If it seems otherwise, it is simply because, as one sign at the rally put it, we fail to use our “inside voices.”
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Yet lost in all of these festive roastings of the Tea Party was the fact that the right-wing “crazies” were closer to the truth than the liberals. After all, as many a leftist columnist pointed out and celebrated, Mandela did at one point advocate the use of violence as a means to liberation, did participate in communist politics, and was, at least earlier in his career, a radical.
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Remaining undisturbed, however, is the assumption that the solution to poverty is to push as many poor people as possible into the job market — to “fix” poor folks rather than restructure the economic institutions that place them in such a quagmire. The fact that this charade of a debate often involves yelling creates the illusion that a fundamental difference is being discussed — but it’s merely the means that are being disputed. At the same time, identifying fundamental disagreements that do exist becomes extremely difficult when one cannot even name what is being struggled over — power. For at the root of the liberal denial of conflict is the liberal denial of power. And on this falsehood, all attempts to honestly confront conflict run afoul. To say that liberals struggle with the concept of power is so familiar that it seems like a truism at this point. Indeed, even liberals themselves – on their leftmost flank, at least – often engage in this critique. Yet as G.E. Lessing once wrote, even those who mock their chains are not always free, and even self-conscious liberals still continually ignore or downplay power ...
Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/why-im-not-a-liberal/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sometimes DU is so pathetic.
I missed it.
Of higher dialogue for those who confuse socialist thought with Sean Hannity. Thanks Joe. 
