The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has reached its "sell-by…" date.
A majority of Americans now tell pollsters the mission was a mistake.
Ninety-eight members of the House – including liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans – have cosponsored Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern's resolution asking the Pentagon to develop an exit strategy.
While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can
we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy?
What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as
an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal
democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
For those still clinging to quaint
notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10
years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of
creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive
belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.
The military coup that overthrew Honduras's elected president,
Manuel Zelaya, brought unanimous international condemnation. But some
country's responses have been more reluctant than others, and
Washington's ambivalence has begun to raise suspicions about what the
US government is really trying to accomplish in this situation.
Notwithstanding commanding support in Congress and with the
American public, the creation of an Accountability Commission is now
being held up by the Obama White House.
The Republican National Committee recently dropped its resolution to
brand the moderate pro-corporate Democratic Party “Socialists.” As the
late, great Democratic Socialist leader Michael Harrington liked to
tell it when he testified before a dying Senator Hubert Humphrey on the
Humphrey-Hawkins Work Bill, that would theoretically guarantee every
American a right to a job, Humphrey bluntly asked him “Is my bill
socialism?” Harrington replied, “Senator, your bill’s not half that
good.”
Some in the Republican Party are trying to re-dub the Democratic Party as the Democrat Socialist Party.
Nothing like getting out the old encrusted red paintbrush.
But I hope some Democrats don't run from this label.
Running doesn't get you anywhere.
Democrats have been running from the label "liberal" since the days of Michael Dukakis, and that hasn't helped them.
And for those who, like me, are actually Democratic Socialists, it's time to come out and say so.
Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could
leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is
not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader
day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we
speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and
with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to
self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in
the United States.
A new survey about public attitudes toward newspapers
gets it precisely backwards. Supposedly most people don't think civic
life would suffer all that much if their local newspaper shut down. But
it's not that they don't care about their newspaper - they don't care
about civic life.
