"The Exhaustion of American Liberalism"
Shelby Steele is a fellow at Stanford University Hoover Institution and an author How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country. Let me share some of what he wrote:
" the Democratic Party's spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos".
"Unlike the civil rights marches of the 1950's and 60's when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today's liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy--hats designed to evoke sexual organs,, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical
anti-Americanism. All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What has ended?"
"America since the 60's has lived through what might be called the age of white guilt"......"White guilt is not actually guilt".....................
"White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is terror of being stigmatized with America's old bigotries racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatize as a fellow traveler with these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority"........................."White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret"..."it is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not the raison d'etre; moral authority is.
"From that followed today's markers of white guilt political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy , the diversity cultural and so on."
"I grew up in a black segregated America where it was hard to find an open door. Its harder now for young blacks to find closed one," that is the reality that made Ms Warren's attack on Mr. Sessions so tiresome". ...
"today's liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and abroad." Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965--an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge. This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity."
"Four thousand shooting in Chicago last year and the mayor announces that he will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption."
Shelby Steele "The Exhaustion of American Liberalism"WSJ 3/6/17
Personal Best Regards:
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