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:

Noam Chomsky on Liberalism - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFDt_yv5a64)

Noam Chomsky on Enlightenment, Classical Liberalism, Anarchism (2/8) - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60z2zGbGbfE)

[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?

[broncofan]

So what is it called when owners profit from their employee's work?
This is the most direct point. Yet, to say this is to accept one of the basic premises of Marx's work, that capitalists make profits based on the work of others. Yet one does not have to accept Marx's conclusions to understand this basic point.

Many of us liberals will happily accept that an entrepreneur has an important place in our society and we do not want to demote him or expropriate his rightful earnings. He has organized a business, he has taken capital and combined it with a vision that has created something greater than the sum of its parts.

Yet there is something else there. He has done this and it has in turn provided him with an enormous reservoir of wealth that can last generations and create dynasties. And he has had the opportunity to do this because he was raised in a country with a certain ethic, a certain amount of infrastructure, a wealth of opportunities for him to take advantage of. What us liberals want is for him to realize that while it is he who has created this wealth, this success did not happen in a vacuum. And others cannot follow in his footsteps unless he pays something back to the system that enabled him to use his vision to create a business or an empire. If one has earned hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and is intent on only protecting it by any means necessary, including by rigging the political system with his capital to protect the rest of it, he prevents others from following in his footsteps.

Republicans will have you believe that not only do ONLY great men generate great wealth, but that they could do it regardless of their circumstances. I am willing to concede many have had great vision but that does not mean they do not owe something to circumstance. Common sense tells us there are great men (and women btw) in every strata of society.

[trish]

The GOP has been complaining that Democrats have invited a war between America’s economic classes, driving a wedge between groups of differing social status and in particular denigrating success. That’s pretty rich spread of lies and a pretty narrow definition of success, a definition so narrow that if you’re not installing the latest in car elevation technology in your summer home’s garage, then you’re not successful. Previously, there were plenty of successful Americans and they didn’t all have summer homes or a fleet of cars. It used to be that if you had family, raised and educated your children and saw them off into the world, had a steady job and a pension on which you could rely when you reached retirement, then you regarded yourself as successful. The GOP does not. In fact the GOP thinks you don’t deserve that pension. Especially if your a public employee like a teacher, or a fireman or a postal worker. They taken to calling your pension a cadallac plan. Yeah, right...a cadallac plan. They blame you, not the wall street bankers, not Bush’s off budget war in Iraq, not the Bush tax cuts nor banking deregulation...no they blame you for the fall of the economy and jobless recovery. Your’s is not the kind of success they find praiseworthy. Indeed you’re not a success...in spite of your years of service, in spite of your professionalism and expertise, in spite of your contributions to family and community, in spite of the fact that you were happy to get by with a middle income salary...you’re a drag on society. You don’t deserve that pension and you don’t deserve a job. Romney would like to fire you, if your GOP governor hasn’t done so already. If you aren’t a public worker, your union has already been busted, your pension raided and your job dissappeared. You’re already enduring hard times. The GOP wants to drive a wedge between you and the public service worker who still has a pension. That’s what they do. That’s how they win votes. With wedges. Have you heard about the wedge between you and your doctor. It actually exists. The GOP wants you to believe it’s the government. No. That multitude of forms you have to contend with whenever you or a family member sees the doctor or goes to the hospital or has a prescription filled...those are from your insurance company. It’s big business that has gotten between you and your doctor. It’s big business that decides what medicines you’re covered for, what procedures and even which hospitials and which doctors you can go to.

[broncofan]

Great post Trish. The Republicans have spent decades excoriating and satirizing those who collect welfare, those who need Medicaid, and have been reluctant to directly attack the Middle Class because they know that their antipathy for the working stiff would expose their agenda and erode their constituency. But in tough times what happens to the Middle Class? What happens to those with graduate degrees who work in the public sector or those who are well-educated and work in the private sector?

What happens when they get laid off and then face a chronic disease without the means to pay for it. This is the social mobility that we have actually seen of late, from the Middle Class to the desperate and the suffering. Admirable people raising families and working hard face tough times and they become the so-called entitlement class. They lose their homes, they lose their pensions, they face health care induced bankruptcy and they become the very individuals that Republicans demonize. And what becomes of their children? Their children see their role models spat on by their government, treated as leaches despite working hard their entire lives, and made destitute by misfortune without any redemption in sight. We really create a lot of justified animosity in the average American when we pretend that they are the authors of their own tough circumstances and that their need for government assistance is borne of sloth or mediocrity.

[Stavros]

What is more interesting to me is why Moynihan, whose political views I believe were shaped by the depression and the New Deal, moved away from the centre ground when it was occupied by the political class that was implementing the civil rights and welfare programmes of the 1960s in which he played a role, as if he felt it had been a mistake.

I think the War on Poverty and the various programmes that the Johnson administration introduced to tackle structural deficits in education and housing among the poor -notably the urban poor- went too far for Moynihan by extending the role of the state, and which appeared to create a dependency on welfare among some social groups which he felt was counter-productive, which is why he ended up in the same camp as Charles Murray.

We seem to me to be facing a dilemma which is the coincidence of welfare provision in societies where mass employment in unskilled jobs no longer exists -this is true on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, as the state gathers less and less taxes from fewer people in work, the burden of the poor has grown- in the 1960s Moynihan assumed 'depressions' would be temporary.

But suppose the old remedies no longer work, and what we have now is what the future looks like, say, for the next 25 years? How would Moynihan think through social policy for a future in which mass production no longer takes place in Europe and the USA, but in Asia?

Romney says that he will create 12 million jobs in his first term, that is 3 million a year. Where are these jobs going to come from, who is going to do them, are they full-time, part-time, low-paid? There is an assumption that we are in a cycle and that we will all get out of -and the USA is doing better than the UK in this regard- but I feel gloomy about the 'recovery', and think we will have a heavy welfare burden for a long time to come. What is the alternative? To let people starve to death?

[Odelay]

I find it funny how OMK blasts those on this board whose views are on the left, for not giving sufficient homage to a Democratic centrist like Moynihan, but when you point out to him that someone like David Frum is one of the few reasonable voices left within the conservative movement, spittle flies out of his mouth as he declares Frum an apostate, a fraud, and definitely not a conservative. Glass houses and all...

[BluegrassCat]

There is always some liberal on here eager to point out ( mistakenly I might ad) about the Republican's move to the right,


It's pretty funny watching OMK lose his mind as the realization sets in that Obama is going to be re-elected and that he's a member of a dying racist rump party.

So if OMK says it, take the opposite and you'll have the truth.

Here's the actual polarization by the two parties and it's obvious it's almost entirely driven by the GOP.