From Adbusters of all places:
The American Left's Silly Victim Complex
The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There's just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds - it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs. No child would bring home a wounded liberal and ask to keep it as a pet. More likely he would step on it, or maybe tie it to a bottle-rocket and shoot it over the railroad tracks.
The word has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I'm not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do - iconoclastic columnists and journalists who've had bylines in places like The Nation - they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.
"Fuck that," responded one, when I asked if he wanted to be quoted in this piece. "I'd rather talk about my genital warts. I'd rather show you pictures of my genital warts, as a matter of fact."
"Ugh. Not sure I want to go there," read one e-mail.
"I really wish I wasn't associated with the left," sighed a third.
When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that's a bad sign, and it's worth asking what the reasons are.
A bit more:
At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.
It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 'police state' (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.
I may have to start reading Adbusters again. After 9/11 and my conversion to Libertarianism, I stopped as they are a forum for many of the left's talking points. This rant is spot on -- the comments at the end are great too. Must have hit a nerve or somthing...
