Fourth Of July Treats
by digby
Here are two final independence day links from two wonderful writers.
Rick Perlstein reviews a new book that helps us put into perspective how we got here:
I want to celebrate Independence Day by recommending a new book. It’s not about conservatism per se. But it’s one of the best manifestos I’ve seen about just how disastrous the conservative vision for American has truly been.
It’s called The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America, and it’s by a young writer named Daniel Brook.
Brook’s got guts. Because frankly, his topic – the fate of the best and brightest graduates of our top-flight universities – sounds like a subject for whiners. Who cares about them, right? They’ll do fine on their own. What do the lifestyle and career choices they make after college have to do with the well-being, moral and material, of the rest of us?
A whole lot, Brook has me convinced. Their plight is a window onto the fate of nothing less than American liberty itself – and how the right has run it into the ground.
The book begins, provocatively enough, by quoting Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination speech – the one in which he proclaimed, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” What he also said was, “The tide has been running against freedom…. In our vision of a good and decent future, free and peaceful, there must be room for the liberation of the energy and talent of the individual… Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our own time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.”
What’s the argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity – and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity – “selling out” – the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty.
Gene Lyons looks at the big picture and helps us see where we are going:
As the nation celebrates Independence Day, there’s ample cause for optimism that our democracy will survive the presidency of George W. Bush intact. That Americans would reject the Bush / Cheney brand of half-baked authoritarianism hasn’t always been clear. (See Joe Conason’s “It Can Happen Here” for details. ) It was touch and go for a while. Frankly, there have been times since 2001 when it was hard not to wonder if we still had the intestinal fortitude to govern ourselves. Politically, the Bush administration is dead in the water.
Enjoy.
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