Re: Gary Trudeau, Iraq and Nader

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

James Devine:
> A major problem here is that the word "liberal" is extremely ambiguous.
> Does it include, say, the PROGRESSIVE magazine? all of the folks at the
> NATION? or what? It's an abstraction, not a real-world phenomenon. Not
> that I'm against abstraction, but it's too easy to hate people tagged with
> such labels without being specific. Self-styled "liberals" vary a lot. I
> think it's better to attack the individual positions that "bad" ones hold
> rather than getting involved in personal criticisms.

Sorry, I didn't think it was worth breaking down the term into more exact
categories. Suffice it to say that the Nation and the Progressive are
left-liberal. Salon.com and the NY Times are center-liberal. The New
Republic and Thomas Friedman are right-liberal.

In any case, liberalism is the dominant ideology of the US ruling class
intelligentsia. People are trained to think like liberals at Columbia,
Princeton, Harvard and other august institutions. This prepares them for
posts in the government, the mass media, the clergy and other dominant
institutions that help to define consensus, in Chomskyan terms. I think
everybody on PEN-L was a liberal at one time or another. Some like me were
conservatives in the late 1950s because they had a visceral reaction
against liberal piety. From my nascent beatnik perspective in 1960, I
thought that JFK was disgusting. Everything about him. The idiotic hairdo,
the touch football, the trophy wife, the blueblood connections, the gaseous
speeches. In other words, the same exact thing that disgusts me about Kerry.

When I got to Bard, I switched to liberalism because it was socially
acceptable and because I began to regard people like Ayn Rand as full of
shit. I came under the influence of Heinrich Blucher (Mr. Hannah Arendt)
who worked for the OSS during WWII and who filled my head with warmed over
Camus. Distrust "isms", that was the message.

In 1966, I began to question liberalism after seeing what LBJ was doing in
Vietnam. Marxism for me has always seemed much more intellectually coherent
than the stuff I heard at Bard or hear today from the likes of David Corn
or Marc Cooper. The problem for liberalism is that it is caught on the
horns of a dilemma. It tries to straddle 18th century Enlightenment values
while being wedded to the most violent and destructive socio-economic
system in the history of the world. Well, that's not my contradiction.