A liberal, as I use the term, is someone who never gives up trying to see the other person’s point of view. A liberal never stops doubting himself, for self-doubt is precisely what allows us to make room in our minds for someone else’s views and to keep the possibility of communication between us alive. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, is someone to whom the very idea of point of view is immaterial, or worse—the foundation of relativism. A warrior who pledges fealty to the god of one Truth, a fundamentalist searches for personal conviction, not mutual understanding.

Using his personal relationship with political pariah Scooter Libby as a backdrop, Nick Bromell devulges his thoughts on the liberal/fundamentalist divide that has gripped our country since the end of Cold War.

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utnereader: How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream?  M.R.I.C.  (May it rest in carnage.) No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the package that’s so yesterday, so underwater, so OWS.  I’m talking about a far more recent dream, a truly audacious one that’s similarly gone with the wind. I’m talking about George W. Bush’s American Dream.  If people here remember the invasion of Iraq—and most Americans would undoubtedly prefer to forget it—what’s recalled is kited intelligence, Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal, dumb and even dumber decisions, a bloody civil war, dead Americans, crony corporations, a trillion or more taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet… well, you know the story.  What few care to remember was that original dream—call it The Dream—and boy, was it a beaut! Keep reading …
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utnereader:

How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream?  M.R.I.C.  (May it rest in carnage.)

No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the package that’s so yesterday, so underwater, so OWS.  I’m talking about a far more recent dream, a truly audacious one that’s similarly gone with the wind.

I’m talking about George W. Bush’s American Dream.  If people here remember the invasion of Iraq—and most Americans would undoubtedly prefer to forget it—what’s recalled is kited intelligence, Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal, dumb and even dumber decisions, a bloody civil war, dead Americans, crony corporations, a trillion or more taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet… well, you know the story.  What few care to remember was that original dream—call it The Dream—and boy, was it a beaut!

Keep reading …

In 1946 we comfortably supposed that Orwell was talking about other people—Nazis and Stalinists, bureaucrats and sociologists… Now recent history has obliged us to extend his dispiriting analysis to ourselves.

Vietnam and WatergateL these horrors will trouble the rest of our lives. But they are not, I suppose, unmitigated horrors. “Every act rewards itself,” said Emerson. As Vietnam instructed us, at terrible cost, in the limit of our wisdom and power in foreign affairs, so Watergate instructed us, at considerably less cost, in the limits of wisdom and power in the presidency. It reminded us of the urgent need to restore the original balance of the Constitution—the balance between presidential power and presidential accountability. In doing this, it has, among other things, brought back into public consciousness the great documents under which the American government was organized.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Politics and the American Language,” The American Scholar, Autumn 1974

Source: theamericanscholar.org