US Liberals: Brain Dead
By Michael Rowan | El Universal
Caracas, 4 May 2005 | There was a time in the United States when one could be proud to be called a liberal. But the robust liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. was abandoned in favor of protests against authority that provided no content for governance. Few in Latin America know this better than Hugo Chavez, whose manipulation of U.S. liberals is akin to Hitler's manipulation of Britain's appeasement liberals leading up to World War Two.
In the 1960s, fierce protests against the Vietnam War and racial injustice accomplished much. But after that, no liberals like the four noted above have appeared on the scene. Their magnificent content in politics, economics and thought waned, while protest for the sake of protest became the liberal mantra. American voters soon realized that liberals were not fit to govern, and had no plan to do so. Bill Clinton was elected twice precisely by disengaging himself from the liberal brand, and hiding his liberalism. Both Al Gore and John Kerry were defeated because they could not say what liberalism meant, which opened the opportunity for the Republicans to defame their purpose.
Inflated with failure, resentment, powerlessness and victimization, liberals continue to protest anything that meets their Pavlovian litmus-test for symbolic meaning. In Chavez they have found a true hero. His skin is the right color; he says the right words; he is against the world order; he is a resentful protestor just like them. To Danny Glover, Michael Moore, or Jimmy Carter, Hugo Chavez meets the test of anti-Americanism, as does his mentor Fidel.
The failure of the Chavez revolution for the poor or against corruption is not important to American liberals. They expect failure. They do not have a plan to govern, a reason to govern, or the capacity to govern, and they would hardly hold the same against Chavez. They have abandoned liberalism in favor of childish protests against authority, and that is what attracts them to Chavez. If they lived here, liberals would be surprised who the real authority is, but in their ignorant bliss, they miss that point as well.
mrowan@cantv.net
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