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BOOK REVIEW: Revealing new history of liberalism
American liberalism has long been a source of fascination, especially for liberals themselves. Because its history has been the subject of countless books, one might think that there is little left to say on the subject. Yet Fred Siegel’s rich new history of liberalism, “The Revolt Against the Masses,” makes an original argument and offers sparkling insights — albeit insights many liberals will be loath to hear — in pungent and pugnacious prose.
Histories of liberalism have become potted. They begin in the Progressive Era (1900-1916) and then quickly move to the New Deal in the 1930s, hit the high points of the civil rights movement and the Great Society of the 1960s, skirt over the problems of the 1970s and 1980s, and then focus
on how liberalism can regain the dominance it deserves today. The focus is usually on the economic dimension and how the American welfare state was constructed to aid the downtrodden.
In contrast, Mr. Siegel locates the origin of liberalism in the overlooked 1920s and focuses on liberalism’s cultural proclivities. He finds a welter of evidence that liberals have been scorned by the middle class. In short, claims that America was a “sick society” and calls for a cultural revolution long predate the 1960s. . . .
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/17/book-review-the-revolt-against-the-masses/
Interesting review. Many point out that liberalism once favored equal opportunity, but degenerated into demanding equal results. But for liberalism to have so easily morphed into Cultural Marxism, liberalism itself would have had to start out deeply flawed. By the same token, many conservatives argue that we need to return to the original Constitution and the intent of the Framers. But if the Constitution could have been so easily subverted into the suicidal political zoo we see today, there must have been some important flaws at the beginning.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was just hijacked by the Supreme Court and other culprits. Either way, there is no way to get back to it now, since to the large numbers of people from different cultures and races being force-fed into America, the Constitutional Founders and their beliefs are about as strange and as ill-fitting as it would be if European Americans were expected to recognize the infinite wisdom of a small esteemed group of Africans, Chinese, Muslims or Mexicans of a couple of hundred years ago.
The larger issue is that our government, run by our open-borders overlords, both Democrat (to a virulent extreme) and Republican, is now 'electing' a new people by demographically (conveniently helped out by minority-on-White violent crime) displacing and erasing European Americans--very quickly in terms of world history.
At the core of this (although of course not an explain-all, given the complexity of human history) is a clash of civilizations well laid out by Kevin MacDonald in 'The Culture of Critique.' To ignore that issue in discussing today's Multicultural Marxism and its rabid Tolerance Police is not only absurd but all too revealing of the fix we are in.
Looks hopeless, but some argue that Western nations are now about where the Soviet Union was in the 1980s, when government elites were desperately trying to enforce utopian views that fewer and fewer people actually believed in. Nature will always reassert itself.
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