Silly Liberals

This Adbusters piece about liberalism and its current state of crisis isn't exactly new--looks like it's from their May/June issue--but it should be required reading in Seattle. The author talks about how liberals are rich white guys who don't really have anything to complain about, but don't seem to do much besides complain. They need to man up and start acting like the born and bred civic rulers they are and blah blah blah. You should read it.

There's a lot of great stuff to cut and paste, but how about this:

“Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement,” he [David Sirota] says. “You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem.”

[Vermont's Socialist Senator Bernie] Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. This basically regressive electoral formula has been a staple of the Democratic Party ever since the Walter Mondale fiasco in the mid-eighties prompted a few shrewd Washington insiders to create the notorious “pro-business” political formula of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to end the party’s dependence upon labor money by announcing a new willingness to sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street. Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.

Within a decade, the process was automatic – Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna.

Here's a tip, though: Don't read the last few paragraphs. Just go on pretending that at the end he doesn't come clean about his personal solution to the crisis of liberals, which is to wring his hands a bit in a glossy magazine editorial and then decide that he's going to refer to himself as a progressive instead of a liberal.