UNDERSTANDING THE LIBERAL MINDSET - 1930-1940s

Understanding the Liberal Mindset - 1930-1940s  - Sunday, August 10, 1014

In pursuit of the truth - http://www/cinopsbegoneblogsport.com -

    I will share a long excerpt from the book by Fred Siegel, "The Revolt of the Masses " - How Liberalism has undermined the Middle Class, Encounter Books, New York, London, 2013

    This short book rewrites the history of modern American Liberalism. It shows that what we think of as liberalism - the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of WWl, in disillusionment with American society.

  

  In the 1920's, the first thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and right. The aim of liberalism's founders - such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken - was to create an American version of the aristocracy long associated with European statism.

     

Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the businessman's pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual's pursuit of pleasure; and in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself in the scornful critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened the leaders of the New Class, who took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering  newly developed rights.

    

The neo-Malthusianism that emerged from the 1960's did not aim to control the breeding habits of the lower classes, as its eugenicist precursors had done, but to mock and restrain the buying habits of the middle class.

   

 Today's brand of liberalism, led by Barack Obama, has displaced the old Main Street private-sector middle class composed of public-sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country's arbiters of elite style and taste.

THE EXCERPT

 "The reality was that the Ukrainian terror-famine produced by Stalin's collectivization of agriculture killed millions of people in the 1932 and 1933. The abolition of private farming enforced buy the Soviet secret police turned the breadbasket of Europe into a charnel house. Had the reality of Soviet mass murders been widely reported in the West, it might have had an impact in American liberal opinion.... While the Soviets simply denied that mass deaths were taking place, Duranty (of the New York Times) was more creative.   

   

 Like his fellow liberals,Duranty, who in part was a product of pre-WWI Greenwich Village, saw a focus on moral issues as a relic of Victorianism. "Right and wrong are evasive terms at best and I have never felt it was my problem - or that of any other reporter - to sit in moral judgment," he wrote. "What I want to know is whether a policy or a political lie or a regime will work or not, and I refuse to be sidetracked by moral issues." ... Russia had been so backward, argue, that Stalin had needed to make war on his own people to force-march the country into the future.

    ... there had been "serious  food shortages throughout the country. But he went on to reassure them: "There is no actual starvation or death from starvation ... he famously explained it in a slogan revived in the 1960s, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

    In 1933 , a banquet was given at the Waldorf-Astoria to celebrate the diplomatic recognition of the USSR by the United STates... This scene at the Waldorf, notes the great historian of the Soviet terror Robert Conquest was clearly a full-dress appearance of the liberal establishment whose menage with Communism would thrive until the late 1940s....

  

  It was from his superior perspective that DURANTY explained., in the style of Mencken and Shaw, that the Russians and Americans who were angry with events in the USSR were to be dismissed....

GEORGE H. KUBECK