The Great Will (TGW) is reliable in his partisan loyalties and given to lecturing ‘Liberals’ who are really New Democrats on the virtues of ‘History’ as elucidated and rhetorically framed by himself. Now, the difference between ‘Liberals’ and New Democrats is probably too fine a distinction for our thinker to bother with, but to an old leftist like me it is revelatory. Which is really to say that Reagan was the great teacher of the New Democrats, who deserted the imperatives of The New Deal for the temptations of their own political ambitions, recognizing that their electability depended on a recognition of a newly conservative mood of the electorate: a simplistic formulation ,but an adequate description. The point of TGW’s latest essay is not to school ‘Liberals’ in American political economy but to promote his candidate, of the moment, Mr. Paul Ryan the Great Fake Republican Budget Master, The Nine Trillion Dollar Man. Here are illustrative quotes, with commentary, from his diatribe that might be more aptly titled ‘Against the Liberals’:
‘The hysteria and hyperbole about Ryan’s plan arise, in part, from a poverty of today’s liberal imagination, an inability to think beyond the straight-line continuation of programs from the second and third quarters of the last century. It is odd that “progressives,” as liberals now wish to be called, have such a constricted notion of the possibilities of progress.’
TGW’s political enmity against The New Deal and The Great Society is a manifestation of his unapologetic advocacy of The Free Market Ideology that brought the economic implosion of 2008, an occurrence that he has never hand the honesty to even mention: alluding to ‘poverty of imagination’ and ‘constricted notions’. And as for ‘The Ryan Plan’ it qualifies as utterly unserious election year propaganda.
‘Liberals think Medicare and Social Security as they exist are “fundamental” to the nation’s identity. But liberals think the Constitution — which the Framers meant to be fundamental, meaning constituting, law — should be construed as a “living” document, continually evolving to take different meanings under whatever liberals consider new social imperatives.’
Social Security and Medicare are fundamental to the nations identity as a resounding answer to the negatives of unfettered Capitalism and its’ inherent anti-humanism, its’ dog eat dog moralisms , that TGW regularly dispenses. Consider, also, the back handed aside about the ‘liberal interpretation’ of the Constitution construed as a ‘living’ document, as part of the sclerotic, reactionary counter interpretation provided by The Originalists: a homegrown American Political Romanticism .
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