The Function of Liberals, Progressives, and Radicals in American Politics

[Sunstone]

Please Note: This thread is posted in the Liberals Only subforum. If you are not a Liberal, do not post in this thread.

In one of his books, Chris Hayes advances a rather sophisticated notion of how Liberals and others on the left function in American politics.

According to Hayes, Liberals are more or less centrists or center-left folk. Groups to the left of Liberals include Progressives and radicals such as true Socialists and true Communists.

Now, the common wisdom seems to be that Liberals are proactive folks who come up with visionary leftist policies and try to get them implemented. But Hayes doesn't believe that. He believes liberals are almost reactionary in that they are driven not by their own proactive visions but instead in response to groups further to the left of them.

Here's how it works. First, groups to the left of Liberals propose a proactive visionary policy that, if implemented, would radically change the status quo in the country. Next, Liberals become alarmed because -- contrary to conventional wisdom -- Liberals actually don't want to change the status quo. For one reason or another they want it to remain about the same. Consequently, Liberals now come up with their own "liberal" proposal to counter the radical proposal.

At this point, Liberals look around for support for their proposal. Often enough, they find support in center or center-right Conservatives who no more want to change the status quo than Liberals do, and who too fear the radical proposal to do so. Together, the Liberals and Moderate Conservatives out-vote the radicals and implement their plan to head off, or short-circuit, the radical plan.

The new Liberal/Moderate Conservative plan now gets implemented. By being implemented it decreases the demand to radically change the status quo, and thus nothing really radical gets done.

Hayes believes that the process might no longer function well because the radical left has all but been destroyed in this country due to sustained attacks against it that began as far back as the 1920s with the Red Scares, and that triumphed around the time Reagan became president. Because the process has been so weakened, the right has been allowed to drift further and further to the right. After all, there's little or no reason for a right winger to stay in the middle if there's no longer a need to compromise with the Liberal left. Hence, he or she is freed to "leave the reservation" and become a far right winger.


Now here's a real life example of what Hayes is talking about. In the 1960s there was a growing pollution crisis in the United States. Radicals proposed to solve the problem in ways that Liberals found threatening to the status quo. Consequently, Liberals united with Moderate Conservatives under the leadership of Richard Nixon, a conservative, to create the Environmental Protection Agency in December of 1970.

Again, one of the last times this process happened on any great scale was due to the health care crisis. Basically, radicals proposed universal single payer health care. Liberals, led by Obama, countered with a Moderate Conservative program first implemented in Massachusetts by a Republican governor. This became known as "Obamacare" and was passed into law by Liberals and a small number of Moderate Conservatives.


Summary: In the view of Hayes and many others now, Liberals are guardians of the status quo who are willing to sell out real change in favor of preserving the status quo.

Just For Your Information.

 

[Kapalika]

It's sad that single payer universal healthcare is "radical" in the United States when almost every single other developed world and developing world nation on the planet has it.

That aside, this kind of lines up with what I've seen in my relatively short life although I didn't realize the extent of it, if what Hay's says is true. It would also explain why the Democrat leadership and DNC are treating Moderate Left now as the Radical Left and moving further to the Right themselves to the point that a run of the mill democrat is a centrist usually leaning somewhat Right if not outright in the central-right.

Also could you tell us what the book's name is? You seemed to not specify it and I wanted to take a look.

 

[joe1776]

Dunno Sunstone, that explanation is plausible but there's a simpler explanation that I prefer. As a group, radical leftists, like myself, are more sophisticated than we once were. We now know that activism is a waste of time and energy. We also know that things are going our way, just a lot more slowly than we'd like.

We know that we might not live long enough to see our vision of the future materialize, but we regard it as inevitable. Meanwhile, politically, we just take what we can get.

Thought of as a decision-making system, our government in the USA is terrible. It's decisive only in a crisis. If it doesn't have one , it creates it.

It doesn't matter who we elect as president. He or she isn't going to do much harm or good.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

According to Hayes, Liberals are more or less centrists or center-left folk. Groups to the left of Liberals include Progressives and radicals such as true Socialists and true Communists.

Now, the common wisdom seems to be that Liberals are proactive folks who come up with visionary leftist policies and try to get them implemented. But Hayes doesn't believe that. He believes liberals are almost reactionary in that they are driven not by their own proactive visions but instead in response to groups further to the left of them

It sounds like Mr. Hayes is referring to three degrees of liberalism and calling only the most centrist group liberals, then saying that they are not the visionaries, but rather, that those further left of them are the ones pushing for change, with the centrists being a little more resistant to change. That doesn't seem like an insight to me. That's pretty much expected.

Incidentally, all of those subsets are liberals to me, not just the most centrist group.

I do agree with the author that notwithstanding the right's use of terms like extreme leftist and radical leftist to describe virtually anybody left of center including corporatist liberals like Obama, actual radicals and extremists on the left seem to have disappeared. What used to be called radical liberals were people like the Weathermen and Angela Davis. If people like that still exist, they're all but invisible and voiceless.

But they never had any influence in most liberals lives. We didn't get our ideas from extremists, and weren't waiting for them to push us into reactive positions to protect the status quo as is suggested.

I wouldn't call people that were more interested in preserving their status quo over taking proactive steps to clean up the land, water and air as liberals, for example. That's pretty much a classic conservative reaction. Forming an Environmental Protection Agency, which puts people before profit, is an example of liberalism whoever came up with the idea, and one that is likely appealing to liberals of all degrees, which seems to contradict the author's thesis that the EPA was the result of prodding by people with even more extreme ideas. What more extreme ideas?

Sure, Nixon and other Republicans and Republican voters supported the idea, but the American political spectrum has shifted dramatically rightward since then, making such people centrists or left of center by today's standards. One only need look at how the modern conservatives are tearing the EPA apart like coyotes on a pork chop as we speak to know what .

I just can't identify with the idea that more centrist liberals need to be prodded into action. This liberal, who sees himself as right of these extremists alluded to, would make sweeping changes to America if he could.- shrink the military, institute universal health care, criminalize lobbying with money, restore the Fairness Doctrine to media, vigorously oppose efforts at voter suppression, train body and dash-cam surveillance cameras that cannot be deactivated on all police activities, raise taxes on the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, and stricter gun regulation come to mind - and I don't need anybody further left of me to push me to that.

Creative topic. You've generated quite a few lately. Thanks.

 

[sun rise]

I think you're channeling Phil Ochs.