Working Up to "The Gold Party:" An Historical Overview of What "Liberalism" and "Progressive" Thought Have Come to Mean- Part One

I remember when I was younger and I found myself chronically on the "liberal" side of American politics, but how often I felt there was something wrong with the whole structure of what was called "Liberalism."

True believer liberals saw nothing wrong, except that they were in fact a coalition of people-- an umbrella group-- that did, in fact, have different goals and attitudes.

This remains true today. The Democratic Party is still a coalition of "the left" or "progressive" ideas of days past, but totally unsure of itself and with good reason.

It won elections and then dropped the ball.

A lot of the problem was with its leadership..

Charismatic leaders such as John F. Kennedy were extremely attractive people and if you looked at their lives overall, rather amazing people. ( Start with Kennedy's record in the military in World War II).

But then the factions of the Democratic Party found themselves stuck with Lyndon Baines Johnson, a strange wheeler- dealer from Texas who was personally grandiose and crude, an "insider" in a rather sleazy political world that less and less was in touch with what average Americans wanted, and then there was a huge rift that opened up between generations-- the young people who questioned LBJ's War in Vietnam, for instance- mostly from better off, better educated households, these anti-war activists in particular, disproportinatley WASP and Jewish, with parents who were , in fact the "Yuppies" of their era.

The "old Democratic base" of  "ethnics" and blue collar workers who were usually socially conservative, knee jerk patriotic and church going were suddenly on a collision course with the young people who often espoused the values of the "New Left."

RACE AND RACISM: America's Original Sin

Racism had been implicit in the conquest of the American continent and the subjugation and extermination of its Native peoples, and the bringing of vast number of slaves from Africa.

In the 19th century, there was a gap that evolved between the North and South in the country based to a large degree on this.

The irony was that neither the abolitionists in the North nor the "Old Confederacy" gentry in the South were really representative of the average (white, European descended) people in their spheres... 

But the average person in the South and the North identified with their sections of the country ( a split California opted for the North, but just by a hair).

Today in Vermont, for instance, one is amazed by all the monuments and gravestones of the Union Dead. The young male populations of endless "Yankee" towns was decimated by the Civil War, and a similar thing happened in the Confederacy.

After the War, the problem of what to do about all the freed slaves  (nobody thought much about the Native Americans, their status as a doomed people was overshadowed by the Great Expansionist Movement of "Manifest Destiny"-- that the North American continent was a New Jersualem that would somehow be "
 a beacon to the world" of all the ideals of the "Founding Fathers".

I cannot here write a history of America that sums all this up in a few paragraphs, but as we roll into an age of Technology and International Affairs never dreamed of by the "Founding Fathers", we have to deal with these ghosts of the pasts is endless ways.

Following this essay I am posting an essay written in 2005 which is the most succinct distillation of what has happened to the "Progressive" movement in the United States...

But there is one little area that has to be discussed in addition before we get to that: American politicians and their appeal or lack of it to the American People.