{"id":26657,"date":"2011-09-26T08:50:33","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T12:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=26657"},"modified":"2011-09-26T08:50:33","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T12:50:33","slug":"nyt-whatever-happened-to-the-american-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=26657","title":{"rendered":"NYT: Whatever Happened to the American Left?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New york Times asks this morning “Whatever Happened to the American Left?<\/a>” lamenting the failure of the Left to mount an effective march in the streets to restore the Left’s agenda to forefront of the American discussion of economics, Michael Kazin writes;<\/p>\n

…except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.<\/p>\n

Instead, the Tea Party rebellion \u2014 led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires \u2014 has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds. Partly as a consequence, Barack Obama\u2019s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter \u2014 although last week the president did sound a bit Rooseveltian when he proposed that millionaires should \u201cpay their fair share in taxes, or we\u2019re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do we account for the relative silence of the left? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, Michael, it could be that the last ten years of vacuous protests against the war against terror have proved useless and pointless. maybe the hippies of the sixties are finally realizing that maybe they didn’t change much at all by being obnoxious little twerps. maybe they realize that the protests were more about assuaging their feelings than actual tangible accomplishments. Not to mention that they don’t understand the discussion at all and the “fixes” that they espouse are just duct tape solutions.<\/p>\n

Also, when you take into account that every word used to criticize this administration is chalked up to racism, that also serves to slence your own side. And, oh, everyone is pretty sure we’re already paying “our fair share” considering what we get from government these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New york Times asks this morning “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” lamenting the failure … NYT: Whatever Happened to the American Left?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,131,154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-i-hate-hippies","category-libertines-suck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}