Bush Admin Demonstrates Dangers of the Left

[carl_pwccaman]

The Bush administration can be seen as the worst of both worlds, politically.

While making moral postures, it is extremely immoral.

It demonstrates the worst potentials of both the right and the left, for all to see.

While is it important to rail against the Bush Administration's authoritarianism and hypocrisy about morals and religion, I think it is also important for the Left to challenge itself through observing the various errors, mistakes, and absurdities of the Bush Administration that may parallel potential errors, mistakes, and absurdities on the left.

Right wingers have complained about left/liberal utopian nightmare schemes, but support Bush when Bush listens to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz's pipe dreams. Isn't there a challenge about ideals and their relation to reality, that everyone might learn from, here?

Right wingers have complained about left/liberal relativism and how it can undermine efforts to restrain abuses of government, but support Bush when he and his cabinet relativize about torture and human and civil rights. Isn't there some insight that can be gained by taking a deeper look at this?

Utopian schemes, ideals detached from real practical concerns, an inability to be criticized by facts of reality, all of these things CAN be dangerous. Conservatives like Voegelin and Buckley weren't wrong to say so. Voegelin's analysis of the Puritans, as found in "New Science of Politics" is very relevant to dealing with the religious right today.

Post-modern relativism really CAN undermine opposition to torture and various human/civil rights. Conservatives like Strauss or Alan Bloom weren't wrong to say so. Their concern about the tension between the contemporary mindset and the foundations set by ancient philosophers are very relevant to sorting out the cultural issues of the reactionaries and extremists of today.

The left, liberals, can certainly learn from Voegelin and Strauss, and the issues that are brought up by them, without becoming "Voegelinites" or "Straussians" (whatever that would amount to), or without becoming illiberal, conservative, or a Republican.

[struggle4progress]

1. The current crisis in American governance -- which involves a ..

.. strange coalition of corporate and rightwing wackos, intent on undermining the system of checks and balances, undoing all progressive gains since the Gilded Age (and especially since the New Deal), and which is associated with a collection of horrors including unnecessary war, torture, government spying, etc -- is NOT an abstract matter that will be resolved by some discussion, with everyone gradually realizing that "everybody is right."

This is a genuine power struggle, and the situation will continue to deteriorate at least until we face up to who our objective enemies are, what they want, what they are doing, and our obligation to fight back effectively.

[carl_pwccaman]

2. Granted, but strategic issues require insight

and so it does matter whether or not the left/liberals learn from mistakes, either from their own or that of others.