Has anyone here read George Packer's Blood of the Liberals? I'm not done reading it but there's a lot in it I'd enjoy discussing. Anyone got comments on it?
Posted by Martha Bridegam at July 7, 2004 11:20 PMI read it a couple of years ago and posted about it on abgo: here and here.
The fact that it was written toward the end of the Clinton administration dates it a little, but I think it holds up quite well.
From what I've read about Thomas Frank's new book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank suggests that liberals simply need to offer sharper economic alternatives. I think Packer makes a good case that the problem with liberalism goes deeper than that.
Posted by: Gene Zitver at July 8, 2004 06:58 PMThx again, Gene. Thx for stopping by too.
Funny: in the '80s I briefly volunteered in the same Boston-area shelter George Packer talks about and also visited a few student-auxiliary meetings of what was apparently his DSA chapter. The shelter was well-meant but a little high-handed: the volunteers were told to frisk the guests as they came in for the night.
Having read parts of the Packer book at its beginning and towards the end but as yet not clean through, I'm not entirely clear on his position but it sure does sound like one of these resentments of liberalism from the left that can easily be confused with conservatism.
I wonder actually if he's defining "liberal" too narrowly. Maybe "liberalism" can be subdivided into side-by-side categories one of which might possibly still include Mr. Packer in spite of himself? For example, could there be an identity-politics liberalism and an economic-equality liberalism and a trade-union liberalism and a civil-liberties liberalism that are different from each other but still able to fit under the same heading? For example, when the "Teamsters for a democratic union" group, or one of Thomas Geoghegan's former clients, has campaigned against old-guard labor people, haven't both sides really been liberals in some sense? Wouldn't they all fit the broad American idea of the "liberal" political category, defined possibly as a non-Utopian faith in the ability of the actual government and society we have to bring about greater equality and fairness without radical change?
I dunno. In my first years as a welfare rights advocate I flatly did not believe the first person who told me that the head of our local General Assistance program probably considered herself to be a liberal & that she would probably take offense at being called anything else. It was really a jolt to hear this. All the contemptuous treatment of poor people, all the gratuitous cutoffs from benefits, all the stupid petty pain and grief to keep from giving eligible, needy people such very small amounts of benefit money -- as far as I could see it was tight-fisted Victorian conservatism at work. How could this woman consider herself a "liberal"? What was she trying to improve or make fairer? It took a long time for the realization to sink in that an entrenched welfare bureaucrat was one kind of "liberal." It was not my kind of "liberal." Still isn't. But her being a "liberal" didn't make it impossible for me to be a liberal while I was also being an outraged opponent of the way that welfare office mistreated people.
Nother thought: isn't liberalism at its best as a moderate pluralist reaction to a true-believing, judgmental hard right such as we have now? Is it possible the present Ashcroftschina is actually bringing the vigor back into liberalism by again making it slightly brave to take liberal positions, as in the 1950s?
Back to Packer -- I haven't read thoroughly enough yet to tell what perspective Packer arrived at after his spiritual journey. Is it some version of "democratic socialism as I understand it" or otherwise?
Anyway that seems to be where Thomas Frank has ended up. I'm looking forward to his book. Thx for the Wash Monthly link.
Also curious if anyone has seen Homeland, the new Maharidge/Williamson book.
Cripe, has that man ever got the Orwell bug bad. Comes back early from a Third World quasi-colonial task, feels overcome with guilt, tries to redeem himself with manual labor and serving "the lower strata," then writes a book about his Third World experience, then writes a couple of novels, one involving a hardscrabble urban background and a struggling writer in early middle age whose name begins with Eric B... , then writes a semi-autobiographical nonfiction book criticizing liberalism and democratic socialism from an amused/despairing insider perspective, then goes off to a war...
Good grief that Orwell bug is a powerful one.
BTW while looking up the above I found he'd written a neat deflation of Dinesh D'Souza and of hothouse conservative provocateurs in general. Also a thoughtfully unimpressed review of the Hitchens Why Orwell Matters book. I've possibly even read these articles before, but if so, knowing more about the writer puts them in a new light.
Check out Packer's New Yorker "Talk of the Town" just out, on the Ukraine and Iraq. Takes a swipe at The Nation, says the Left should fight Bush on the competency of his stated policy of bringing democracy to countries with bad regimes, not on his dishonesty. Of course Packer skips the reality that, if it's Bush who "liberates" anywhere, the first "democratic" import is lower taxes and the first retained law is prohibition of unions. It's better that bad places not be "liberated" while Bush is in as the only result is corporate enfiefdom, not democracy.
Mathews Hollinshead
St. Paul, MN (Wellstone Country)