Return of the "L" Word
A Liberal Vision for the New Century
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- $42.99
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- $42.99
Publisher Description
Somewhere in the 1970s liberals in the United States lost their way. After successes like the New Deal, they became arrogant. So argues Douglas Massey in Return of the "L" Word. Faced with the difficult politics of race and class, liberals used the heavy hand of government to impose policies on a resentful public. Conservatives capitalized on this with a staunch ideology of free markets, limited government, and conservative social values. The time is ripe for a liberal realignment, declares Massey, but what has been lacking is a consistent liberal ideology that explains to voters, in simple terms, government's vital role in producing a healthier, more financially equitable, less divided society.
This book supplies that ideology. Massey begins his powerful manifesto by laying out the liberals' mistakes over the past twenty years. Drawing on insights from the expanding field of economic sociology, he then sets forth a clear set of liberal principles to explain how markets work in society, principles he applies to articulate salable liberal policies.
After outlining a new liberal political philosophy, Massey traces liberalism's opposition and says plainly: liberals should have no illusions about the competition's resolve and skill. He closes with a practical approach to liberal coalition-building in America. The political economy conservatives have constructed in recent decades has benefited 20 percent of the people. Liberal success requires a return to material rather than symbolic politics, showing most Americans why it is in their economic as well as moral interest to support the liberal cause.
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Though this slim manifesto from Princeton sociology and public affairs professor Massey purports to offer a blueprint for liberals who want to "turn the tables on conservatives," it is largely a one-sided argument in favor of Democrats and against "radical" Republicans. In his attempt to recast the word "liberal" as a positive descriptor, Massey defines the term so broadly that it loses much of its meaning, and the optimistic picture he paints of the liberal utopia that supposedly existed before the rise of the VARWICON (i.e., the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy") will raise some eyebrows. But this is an unabashedly partisan work, one that attempts to reach out to the dedicated fan bases of Paul Krugman and Molly Ivins. Unfortunately, Massey offers little here that's new. He dissects the tactics of conservative contingents and levels familiar accusations at the "House of Bush" and its "cronies." However, he doesn't just blame conservatives: he is withering in his assessment of liberals' inability to defend their principles and connect with voters. Massey proposes some items for a liberal agenda-including increased market transparency and large-scale education reform-and his use of economic sociology to analyze markets is intriguing. But it yields no particularly innovative prescriptions for Liberals looking to restore the strength of their party; instead, he falls back on the facile, binary worldview he claims conservatives possess.