Quote:
Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
I think we basically agree, if we say this:
1. Right and left are meaningless in the U.S. It's an easy shorthand that isn't all that descriptive of their political tradition, which has actually oscillated between populism and anti-populism, which the astute reader will notice are not actually ideologies at all but styles of rhetoric.
2. All mainstream political thinkers in the U.S. are liberal. There are nut-jobs (Green-party hippies, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and tea-party types) who are still liberals but don't realize it--and they ratchet up their rhetoric to account for their profound feeling of disenchantment with the polity.
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We can probably add a third in there and say that liberalism, regardless of its strain, is fundamentally about maintaining some sort of abstract capitalist ideology.
I should stop reading Eagleton.