The overriding question of James Flynn’s latest book is so great that he’s named his book after it: Where Have all the Liberals Gone? His conclusion: liberals in the US need to show more courage in confronting the rhetoric and policies of the out-going administration, or they’ll prove themselves to be complicit. And that doesn’t mean pacifism or inaction, either.

James R. Flynn

The question I have posed has a simple answer:  not as long as liberals allow their opponents to define political reality.  Ring wing dominance of American politics is easy to understand: popularize a hysterical image of a dangerous world; devote surplus government revenue to ensure “national security”; thus evade a debate about domestic priorities that you might lose; thus leave a vacuum to be filled by trivia such as prayer and gay marriage. This is not to accuse the right of duplicity.  Political actors usually manage to believe whatever maximizes their influence.

It is hard to tell whether American liberals have lost their voice because they lack courage or because they half believe in the same picture of reality.  That they have forfeited their tradition of social reform is shown by the paucity of their hopes for an Obama victory.  These amount to little more than damage control, that is, cleaning up the worst of the messes that the Bush administration has created.  Get US troops out of Iraq, not attack Iran, regulate the financial sector, and manage the coming recession.

Liberals and Words

The right-wing image of the world is absurd: America is safer than at other time over the past 80 years.

No other nation qualifies as a great power and those that come closest, Russia and China, are not expansionist but inward looking.  No “rogue” state is mad enough to launch some feeble attack on America to be obliterated in return.  Even Stalin with his huge nuclear arsenal was not that mad.  Hostile subterranean groups are relatively weak and can be combated cheaply and effectively.  They may have one or two more successes over the a period of decades, but the casualties they have inflicted thus far are less than those America has chosen to inflict on itself by pointless wars.  Let us look at some of the rhetoric that emasculates liberalism.

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