Liberals

by tristero

Tony Judt wrote an article in the London Review of Books which began by asking, “Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy?” Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin responded in The American Prospect with a manifesto that said in essence, “Who you talkin’ about, Tony?”

But Tony has simply observed what all of us have known for the longest time: genuine liberalism – hell, even centrism – has long gone missing from the mass political discourse in the United States. The closest anyone can find to a liberal on tv – and folks, I love them dearly, but Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert are comedians – are liberal hawks of the George Packer/Paul Berman/Peter Beinart variety.

Judt makes this, unfortunately, quite clear by pointing out that in 1988, a “reaffirmation” of liberalism published in the NY Times was signed by, among others, Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe, Eudora Welty, Kenneth Arrow, and Robert Penn Warren. Many positive things can be said about the people on the current list (which, btw, includes Arrow and Schlesinger), but in terms of name recognition and cultural status, it just isn’t the same. Who has taken their place? Not the signers of the Prospect manifesto, surely. Instead, those presently with name recognition and cultural status in America are genuine morons: Paul Wolfowitz, Bill O’Reilly, William Kristol, Max Boot, and, to take Pynchon out of context, the rest of the Whole Sick Crew.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am NOT saying that the signers are in any way lightweights. There are many important thinkers among the signatories. What I’m saying is that they have, at present, next to zero stature in mainstream American culture. To claim, as Judt did of the ’88 manifesto, that the present one is an “open rebuke” of a conservative president’s folly is to ascribe much more influence to the signers of this manifesto than they command in American intellectual, let alone political and cultural, life.

American culture has literally eliminated liberals and liberalism from any consideration of serious influence. What this esoteric little spat among the intelligentsia illustrates is just how much work we liberals have cut out for us in order to regain anything resembling serious stature, let alone influence, in the US.