The unforgiving, part 3

The overly long journey through parts 1 and 2 of this post will finally draw to a close here, now that I understand the point I should have been making all along. I initially started these three posts to write about the disconcerting feeling that I am a stranger in a strange land when it comes to liberalism in the 21st Century. Well, I was right and I was also wrong.

In short, I now know that the disconnect I feel with today's liberals comes from my past with the more radical leftist philosophy, not the left, and I'd like to explain that idea briefly.

In the late 60's and early 70's, the people I associated with--the people who helped to shape my political views--were not subversives, domestic terrorists, or violent agitators. However, they did share a horror at the state of American culture and government. For people of conscience and for "aware" people, America was not a pleasant place to be in those days. Everything, absolutely everything seemed like a big lie or scam; and some young people couldn't stand it.

Those young people wanted the world to be different and better, but how do you go from having an entrenched society, immovable cultural norms, and a dishonest government to the utopia that so many of us believed was possible?

You destroy the system and start over. You tear down the basic, foundational framework of the status quo and rebuild on top of its ruins. The destruction doesn't have to be violent, indeed it shouldn't be, but it needs to be complete, and it needs to bring about a massive shift in the values and actions of both individuals and the larger society.

That kind of thinking gets the label of radical, not liberal, or in some circles it's called the far left.

Today's liberals have never held that view. Instead, they try to identify solutions within the existing social, cultural, and governmental systems, no matter how flawed those systems may be. The more modern liberals try to repair what is broken, not start over. They believe the foundation is sound even if the house is a "fixer-upper."

As a result, even though liberals see the same problems I see around us and even though they share many of the same goals I hold, they believe the solution lies in "the system." For the most part, I do not.

One of the comments on this blog observed that there have been decent, honest people who went into politics, only to be corrupted after a few years in the game. That's true--because it's a corrupt, soul-killing system that eats them alive. Putting a "good" man or woman in office, therefore, accomplishes little in the face of a system that operates ruthlessly to turn all things to the service of greed, arrogance, profiteering, and dishonesty. (For that reason, by the way, Obama is doomed.)

So that's my grand realization. It's true that I'm not fully compatible with today's liberals, but I don't feel completely out of touch with them. We're just coming from different places, as the pop psychologists say. Liberals look for solutions inside the system while I say there are no solutions to be found in the problem itself. They want to make the system better. I don't even try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

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