I grew up in the sixties near Berkeley Ca. I loved the hippies, peace, love, flower power. I had no idea what political party they were aligned with. Protesting a bogus war seemed cool too. I guess that’s a very liberal view or is it conservative?
I grew up in the sixties near Berkeley Ca. I loved the hippies, peace, love, flower power. I had no idea what political party they were aligned with. Protesting a bogus war seemed cool too. I guess that’s a very liberal view or is it conservative?
Up until the Iraq war, the Left was reliably anti-neocon. Bush-Cheney were derided as "warmongers". Nevertheless, a political sea change was set in motion with the 9/11 attacks. Even reliably liberal rags such as the NYT rallied behind the war effort — downplaying the word of inspectors who took issue with the Bush administration overstatements (lying) about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and Iraq's alleged connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
To really understand how the Left became hijacked, however, it is necessary to understand the influence of historian and neoconservative think tank icon Robert Kagan. In a 2014 interview in the NYT, Kagan said that he welcomed Hillary Clinton's run for president in the hope she would support a more "interventionist" foreign policy than Obama did. Indeed, during the 2016 election it was Hillary Clinton who proposed a "No Fly-Zone" over Syria that would essentially, in the words of Gen. Joseph Dunford, have precipitated a direct conflict with Russia. Needless to say, the piece goes on to concede that the neoconservative brand had been sullied by the Left's repeated attacks on Bush-Cheney and that Kagan now preferred to call it "liberal interventionism". Instead of "nation building", liberal interventionism emphasized "humanitarian intervention" as a means to obtain much the same level of support for war efforts as the Right granted in the name of spreading democracy.
Kagan successfully rebranded and rebooted neoconservatism into the Democrat party and nothing has been the same since. The old Left would have roundly condemned the Military-Industrial Complex and the actions of the so-called deep state. The New Left is an apologist for that same establishment. Taken together with the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, in which there is functionally no way to prevent millions of dollars of foreign money from flooding into our political system through SuperPACs, we aren't looking at the same America we were looking at even 10-20 years ago. The old Left opposed globalization for its role in diminishing the earning power of the working class. The New Left seems more intent on the plight of non-citizens than securing the safety, economic opportunity and academic standing of American citizens.
I don't think the generation who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s appreciates that they have drifted so far out of keeping with what the Left once stood for (chief among them the ACLU and their robust defense of all manner of speech). Figures such as Glen Greenwald and Matt Taibbi represent the last of the old guard — yet their classical liberal values are foreign to modern MSNBC audiences and social media users under the age of 30. The New Left is either full-out Marxist — the harsh economic and social lessons of the Soviet Union, Cuba and China largely lost upon them — or hopelessly adrift in a social/media landscape in which groupthink informs one's political "values" on a minute-by-minute, news-narrative-by-news-narrative basis.
When one considers the state-of-the-art weaponry at the immediate disposal of our overlords, it may as well be 300 million "thank you, SIR! May I have another?!"
What is a bogus war? That there would need a lot of explaining and it would probably be like trying to tell a bunch of kindergartners there's no Santa Claus.
I grew up in the sixties near Berkeley Ca. I loved the hippies, peace, love, flower power. I had no idea what political party they were aligned with. Protesting a bogus war seemed cool too. I guess that’s a very liberal view or is it conservative?
Up until the Iraq war, the Left was reliably anti-neocon. Bush-Cheney were derided as "warmongers". Nevertheless, a political sea change was set in motion with the 9/11 attacks. Even reliably liberal rags such as the NYT rallied behind the war effort — downplaying the word of inspectors who took issue with the Bush administration overstatements (lying) about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and Iraq's alleged connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
To really understand how the Left became hijacked, however, it is necessary to understand the influence of historian and neoconservative think tank icon Robert Kagan. In a 2014 interview in the NYT, Kagan said that he welcomed Hillary Clinton's run for president in the hope she would support a more "interventionist" foreign policy than Obama did. Indeed, during the 2016 election it was Hillary Clinton who proposed a "No Fly-Zone" over Syria that would essentially, in the words of Gen. Joseph Dunford, have precipitated a direct conflict with Russia. Needless to say, the piece goes on to concede that the neoconservative brand had been sullied by the Left's repeated attacks on Bush-Cheney and that Kagan now preferred to call it "liberal interventionism". Instead of "nation building", liberal interventionism emphasized "humanitarian intervention" as a means to obtain much the same level of support for war efforts as the Right granted in the name of spreading democracy.
Kagan successfully rebranded and rebooted neoconservatism into the Democrat party and nothing has been the same since. The old Left would have roundly condemned the Military-Industrial Complex and the actions of the so-called deep state. The New Left is an apologist for that same establishment. Taken together with the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, in which there is functionally no way to prevent millions of dollars of foreign money from flooding into our political system through SuperPACs, we aren't looking at the same America we were looking at even 10-20 years ago. The old Left opposed globalization for its role in diminishing the earning power of the working class. The New Left seems more intent on the plight of non-citizens than securing the safety, economic opportunity and academic standing of American citizens.
I don't think the generation who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s appreciates that they have drifted so far out of keeping with what the Left once stood for (chief among them the ACLU and their robust defense of all manner of speech). Figures such as Glen Greenwald and Matt Taibbi represent the last of the old guard — yet their classical liberal values are foreign to modern MSNBC audiences and social media users under the age of 30. The New Left is either full-out Marxist — the harsh economic and social lessons of the Soviet Union, Cuba and China largely lost upon them — or hopelessly adrift in a social/media landscape in which groupthink informs one's political "values" on a minute-by-minute, news-narrative-by-news-narrative basis.
The US is up for grabs. Any takers? We have 300 million guns and we will shoot at you.
Who would buy us? We're kind of a nation of lemons at this point. Thanks.
When one considers the state-of-the-art weaponry at the immediate disposal of our overlords, it may as well be 300 million "thank you, SIR! May I have another?!"
I also have a high powered sling shot and I'm fairly accurate with it.
Right on again, SocialCritic. Thanks!
It would confuse today's Liberal anyway.
What is a bogus war? That there would need a lot of explaining and it would probably be like trying to tell a bunch of kindergartners there's no Santa Claus.
As the great Smedley Butler said, "War is never about enemies. It's about opportunities for profit."
Every war the United States has entered in my lifetime. I was born in 1960. I typically stick to my lifetime but it goes back much further.
I have lots of issues with the hippies, like the great Eric Cartman. But they did fuel the only large antiwar movement in our history. Thanks.