The Last Liberal Visionary

[onmyknees]

Where are the disciples of Senator Moynihan in today's far left liberalism? Compare the temperament, intellect and decency of the Senator to characters like Debbie Downer Schultz, or Nancy Pelosi or the repulsive Chuck Schummer, Al Franken, the light weight Harry Reid...the list goes on.....or Obama and his constant attempts to separate Americans into groups for purposes of political gain and to convince them they deserve the fruits of someone else's labor. . The conscience of your ideology died along with the Senator. There is always some liberal on here eager to point out ( mistakenly I might ad) about the Republican's move to the right, but few of you have the stomach for self evaluation. So I'm force feeding you....

It’s time for a revival of interest in the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the last American politicians with serious intellectual credentials as well. (Compare Moynihan to Obama to see how shallow and mythical are the latter's intellectual attainments.) Moynihan was one of the first people to try to deal with the lurch leftward of the liberal and Democratic streams that is now so dangerously dominant in America.

In 1970, Moynihan wrote

“A post-liberal critique is necessary and we are trying to evolve one: not because we don’t know enough, but because we know too much to be content with the wisdom of the 1940s.”

He was writing in response to three developments. First, the New Left challenge of the 1960s that seems to be furnishing the ideas and personnel running America today.

Second, he refers to the failures and problems arising from an ever larger, more powerful government. Moynihan was particularly interested in how well-intentioned welfare policies had disastrous effects on their victims (I mean, “beneficiaries.”)

And third he was worried by the undermining of the very elite institutions, in particular the universities, that were supposed to be the watchdogs to provide a reality check and keep politicians from straying into dangerous territory. Moynihan wrote, over-optimistically as it would turn out:

“In the best universities the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left. The inadequacies of traditional liberalism are equally unmistakable, while, no less important, the credulity, even the vulgarity of the supposed intellectual and social elite of the country has led increasing numbers of men and women of no especial political persuasion to realize that something is wrong somewhere. These persons are [our] natural allies.”

Unfortunately, nowadays, these people are relatively rare in academic institutions swamped with ideologues who are proud to be indoctrinators.

Moynihan noticed the increasingly deep divisions in America that have now widened into chasms of conflict:

“America has developed, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, `an adversary culture’….The `culture’ is more in opposition now than perhaps at any time in history....As Richard Hofstadter recently observed, some really surprising event…is going to have to happen to change the minds of the present generation.”

One might have thought that this event would have been September 11, 2001, but it didn’t turn out that way. Perhaps that event will be the Obama Administration's follies and failures.

[Stavros]

This is a deceptive post on your part. You want to undermine the Obama Presidency by claiming that it has a liberal, for all I know you think even a 'far left liberal' tendency - this will come as a surprise to anyone on the left -from where they are looking Obama is right up there with the bankers of Wall St and the murky CIA and how many other prized institutions of the USA?

If you want a serious discussion about Moynihan, you might want to provide a context for the private report that he gave to LBJ a few weeks before the latter's historic speech at Brown University in June 1965, The Negro Family: the Case for National Action. You might want to re-consider its arguments in the context of rising unemployment among Black men, its negative portrayal of Black women, its linkage between delinquent fathers and family welfare programmes.

You might also wonder why a report on the 'breakdown' of the black family published by E Franklin Frazier in 1939 was ignored, or a similar report published by Bayard Rustin in the same year as Moynihan (1965). Intelligent Black Men had been dissecting the evidence and developing policy options years before Moynihan got in on the act.

Crucially, as it is part of your agenda, instead of painting anyone you deem to be on the left to be a 'liberal threat', you would do better to tangle with the difficult issue of equality and liberty: IF the Federal government attempts to deal with poverty through welfare programmes in the hope that giving people without opportunity that opportunity to get an education and a job and eventually their own independence, does it infringe the liberty of taxpayers who believe their money is being spent on drop-outs, drunks, and serial baby-makers who never stick around to look after their offspring? You need to ask why interventionist legislation was passed in the first place. You could also ask: if Federal programmes of the kind criticised by Charles Murray were all abandoned, what would happen? Neither Reagan nor Bush did it, why not?

You could also ponder this paradox: is it not the case that for most of US history, when there was full employment for Black Americans, they had no liberty at all: they were slaves -?

As for Moynihan, yes he was a sparkling intellectual, and a man to be taken seriously; but don't forget that he travelled from a mainstream Democrat position to one that was allied with the growing so-called 'Neo-conservative' arena typifed by his membership of the Committee on the Present Danger during the Carter Presidency, made up of people opposed to Detente, arms reductions talks with the USSR, and a precursor to the Project for a New American Century. Not exactly a Liberal of any description.

I make this point because you do not acknowledge the damage that has been done to the US economy, its foreign relations, and the reputation of the country by the Reagan and Bush Adminstrations, both Bush I and Bush II. You might want to spend most of your effort trying to convince your fellow Americans why the Neo-Conservative right, rather than the disorganised, disillusioned, disparate so-called American 'left' is a far greater threat. And most academics in most universties are conservative, not liberal.

At the core of welfare policy is not a debate on 'left' or 'right', but a boring dissection of bureaucratic politics which is actually where a lot of your dollar-guzzling day-to-day policies get inflated and shape-shifted -just as they do here in the UK.

[Ben]

What is liberalism? Noam Chomsky explicates:

[flabbybody]

Moynihan was the legal spirit behind the federal program designed to provide basic health care to the American underprivileged. It's called Medicaid. I wish he was alive now to battle for its survival.
He was the statesman who took on the party bosses and his very beloved Catholic Church in a city that was controlled by the New York Irish political mob for over a century that preceeded him.
Before Moynihan they owned City Hall, NYPD, the municipal unions, the board of education, and most every other part of local government.

Things are a little better now because of him. If you think Moynihan was a hero then there's hope for you.

[tek27]

Moynihan was the legal spirit behind the federal program designed to provide basic health care to the American underprivileged. It's called Medicaid. I wish he was alive now to battle for its survival.
He was the statesman who took on the party bosses and his very beloved Catholic Church in a city that was controlled by the New York Irish political mob for over a century that preceeded him.
Before Moynihan they owned City Hall, NYPD, the municipal unions, the board of education, and most every other part of local government.

Things are a little better now because of him. If you think Moynihan was a hero then there's hope for you.

are you really a banker or a politician in disguise? fuckin A man. Im in love, no homo

[Stavros]

Moynihan was the legal spirit behind the federal program designed to provide basic health care to the American underprivileged. It's called Medicaid. I wish he was alive now to battle for its survival.
He was the statesman who took on the party bosses and his very beloved Catholic Church in a city that was controlled by the New York Irish political mob for over a century that preceeded him.
Before Moynihan they owned City Hall, NYPD, the municipal unions, the board of education, and most every other part of local government.

Things are a little better now because of him. If you think Moynihan was a hero then there's hope for you.

I can't disagree with this, the question must be why Moynihan shifted his political perspectives by the 1980s, or whether he felt that it was the Democrats who had moved away from him.

[broncofan]

First of all I think Al Franken is a pretty well-informed and intelligent person. Second of all, I don't think Obama has tried to convince people they deserve the fruits of other's labor.

In a capitalist society, people who make billions of dollars have really gotten out-sized returns for ideas they have put into action. It does not mean they are not great entrepreneurs or even that they don't deserve the wealth they have. But it is not unreasonable that they pay a higher tax (say, 39%) in order to give back to the society that enabled them to earn this kind of money and live such a great lifestyle. I don't see how it's ideal to have a shrinking middle class, little social mobility, and very poor opportunities for people at the bottom socioeconomically.

By employing rhetoric that calls any social program socialism, and calls even a graduated tax system socialist, Republicans give the impression that they care little about the American Dream and want to bleed the average American to death for the betterment of the elite in this country. There are plenty of liberal visionaries today and their plans and designs are being blocked by an obstructionist senate bent on re-defining what this country stands for.

[Prospero]

Why do people persist in arguing with OMK? Why do they post intelligent ripostes to his smears? What is the point. He surely neither reads them nor takes any notice if he does.
His business is propaganda - pure and simple. I've read his posts now for a year or more and he never-ever engages with intelligent questions or responses from anyone - but simply publishes sneers and lie-filled smears. A waste of your time folks. If you ant more of his drivel watch Fox where, at the very least professionals patch together their threadbare tapestries of lies and distortions.

At least someone like Loren will actually respond and discuss and offer arguments.

[broncofan]

I don't consider being the editor of Harvard Law Review and a Harvard Professor shallow intellectual attainments. But perhaps you've done better OMK?

[Willie Escalade]

"...Obama and his constant attempts to separate Americans into groups for purposes of political gain and to convince them they deserve the fruits of someone else's labor."

So what is it called when owners profit from their employee's work?