August 5, 2012

Liberal Decay

By Jeffrey Folks
Last week I spent a few hours with one of America's finest writers. My old friend is still writing, producing some of the best fiction published in America today. And like most writers and intellectuals in this county, my friend is a staunch liberal. He has been a liberal for over 60 years. Like many in his generation, his liberalism is a relic of the days when the left identified, or at least claimed to identify, with hard-pressed working men and the unemployed. My friend's liberalism has not evolved. It is stuck in fond memories of a childhood during which FDR's soothing voice filled the airwaves with those heartening fireside chats. For 11 years Roosevelt proclaimed that prosperity was "right around the corner." The corner was never turned, but three times the people reelected him. That is the jolly, hopeful, "we're all in it together" sort of liberalism to which my writer friend still ascribes. He seems not to have noticed that the left has become at once more radical and more...(Read Full Article)