Vapid Liberalism

I guess I am a liberal. Maybe not the most enthusiastic. I admit sympathy with Anarcho-syndicalism - it is a cool name. 

I got vapid liberalism from reading Against Liberalism, a review of Luke Savage’s The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History which takes as its purpose explaining liberalism's limitations:

Savage points out that for Ochsian liberals, being “realistic” ends up meaning: telling us we can’t actually accomplish any progressive goals. It has gotten to the point, he says, where “‘realism’ has become an identity unto itself, unmoored from any programmatic orientation toward the future or sustained effort to bring about significant change.” Savage shows how this works by looking at the politics of Canada and blue states, places where liberals are actually in charge and no longer have the excuse of having their goals thwarted by Republicans. By looking at what liberals do when they do not have political constraints, we can see if they are indeed motivated by a realistic recognition of the limits of the politically possible, or whether they are, as Ochs alleged, ultimately just shy about doing anything that could raise their own taxes or that smacked of “revolution.” Savage observes that “even in solidly blue states where Democrats face none of the institutional impediments that confront them in Washington, DC, robust progressive legislative agendas are rare.” (Savage and I also once looked at what Barack Obama did when he left office, when he was free to speak his mind without fear of political repercussions, to see whether he was better classified as a “realistic progressive” or a conservatively-inclined neoliberal.) Savage concludes that “what is generally called liberalism is functionally small-c conservatism,” and while the right may hysterically label Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau radical leftist socialists, the truth is that these men pose zero threat to the ruling class....

Yet we have Republicans screeching about liberals as if they were Bolsheviks ready to storm the Winter Palace. 

For myself the important thing now is to oppose fascism.

sch 8/13/22