"Art is a lie that tells the truth" -- Pablo Picasso
Monday, November 28, 2011
Thought For the Day
I never imagined that the New Deal policies my parents took for granted when I was growing up would become the fringey lefty dreams of young anarchists. I never foresaw The New Deal becoming the stuff of radicalism.
What the American Left does not seem to understand is that the American Right has no interest in fighting the civil rights battles of the 60s and 70s over again--most conservatives long ago signed onto those.
What the Right is trying to do now is a do-over of the thirties--to win a battle it initially lost to Roosevelt.
Next up for Teabagistan: proposal to replace FDR w/ Reagan on the dime. [To be followed by lowering minimum wage to 10c/hour. Compromise w/ getting rid of the min. wage altogether]
Perhaps it's the USA itself that is the radical idea, or so historians like Gordon Wood and James MacPherson argue. MacPherson points out that the rest of the world in 1860 looked like the South -- a single privileged class controlling everything to its advantage and depending on large populations of disenfranchised and indentured labor. It was the North that was out of step. Gordon S. Wood makes a similar argument pointing out how sharply different in form and spirit from the rest of the world were the many experiments in direct democracy on the eve of the Revolution.
Perhaps as the USA makes the transition from democracy to oligarchy it is finally at long last fitting more comfortably into the time honored Way of the World. Perhaps, far from being radical and on the fringe, the #Occupy movement is a fond recollection of this country's founding principles before they are discarded as inconvenient by its ruling class.
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The New Deal was radical.
ReplyDeleteWhat the American Left does not seem to understand is that the American Right has no interest in fighting the civil rights battles of the 60s and 70s over again--most conservatives long ago signed onto those.
What the Right is trying to do now is a do-over of the thirties--to win a battle it initially lost to Roosevelt.
Kishnevi
Next up for Teabagistan: proposal to replace FDR w/ Reagan on the dime. [To be followed by lowering minimum wage to 10c/hour. Compromise w/ getting rid of the min. wage altogether]
ReplyDeleteMy father hated Roosevelt. I used to remind him of that every time he deposited his Social Security check into his FDIC insured bank account.
ReplyDeleteI see that the right these days is determined to vindicate Andrew Mellon, no tribune of the people.
Perhaps it's the USA itself that is the radical idea, or so historians like Gordon Wood and James MacPherson argue. MacPherson points out that the rest of the world in 1860 looked like the South -- a single privileged class controlling everything to its advantage and depending on large populations of disenfranchised and indentured labor. It was the North that was out of step.
ReplyDeleteGordon S. Wood makes a similar argument pointing out how sharply different in form and spirit from the rest of the world were the many experiments in direct democracy on the eve of the Revolution.
Perhaps as the USA makes the transition from democracy to oligarchy it is finally at long last fitting more comfortably into the time honored Way of the World. Perhaps, far from being radical and on the fringe, the #Occupy movement is a fond recollection of this country's founding principles before they are discarded as inconvenient by its ruling class.
RE: New Deal = stuff of radicalism...
ReplyDeleteYeah, seriously. :P
Frances Perkins, that Bolshy. Worker safety! The very idea ...
ReplyDelete