The America liberalism fathered

At the risk of giving up any points won over three decades of family dinner arguments, I can relate to the quip, often misattributed to Mark Twain, about how when I was 14, my father was so ignorant it hurt to have him around. By the time I was 24, he knew a great deal about the world. It’s remarkable how much he’d learned in just 10 years.

For my father, Fred, some of that learning is now in “The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump,” a new collection of his essays over the decades about the America that emerged in the long hot summer of 1967 and that’s drifted ever since in and out of an intermittent political heatwave that is spiking again now.

In his telling, and this is one of the big family arguments, “the tolerant, anti-racial, open-minded and empirically oriented liberalism of Post-World War II America” gave way to an intolerant, illiberal new left hostile to empiricism and oriented around irrationalist identity politics. Over 50 years, that new left has used a series of rolling riots to try and create “a society that is nothing but an endless power struggle among organized groups,” as Hubert Humphrey supposedly warned about in 1968.

One of the first fronts in that struggle was the academy, where the new left used a series of occupations to demand new departments, fields of study and bases of power at around the same time that my dad was beginning his own academic career. College administrators found common ground with campus radicals to claim spoils within the ivory tower and then more broadly while a new generation of academics replaced the idea of verifiable truth with a postmodernist notion of narrative “truths.” Many in this new culture dismissed the conventional family unit and the individual’s claim to autonomy as decaying bourgeois values in service of a corroded capitalist ethos.

A key theme of the book is the idea that the new left’s top-bottom alliance, with the rich subsidizing an endlessly expanding administrative state that in turn subsidizes and tends to the poor, has squeezed out the people in the middle who aren’t hard up enough to need the state’s ministrations or well off enough to subsidize its operations but remain subject to its endlessly expanding cost, reach and regulations. Over time, that top-bottom alliance transformed poverty from an economic condition into a semi-permanent social class.

It was John Lindsay, of all people, who warned while running for mayor in 1965 that a city income tax “would terrify middle-income people. New York City would then be a city of the very rich and the very poor.” Lindsay won that three-way race with just 43% of the vote, and, the book notes, the next year he created the very income tax he’d warned against (along with the now late and lamented commuter tax) to support Fun City’s rapidly expanding welfare roll and rising wages for unionized public sector workers.

There’s much more to “The Crisis of Liberalism” and my disagreements with it, starting with my dad’s contention that America’s great opportunity for redress and integration for African-Americans was wasted on Great Society programs and Black Power rhetoric during the boom years of the 1960s and then a half-century of watered-down repeats, than I can fit into 800 words.

But I did want to use a few of those words to let him explain why, since at least 2008, he’s been describing Barack “Change You Can Believe In” Obama to me as the second coming of John “He Is Fresh and Everyone Else Is Tired” Lindsay.

Here’s his answer:[i] [/i]Like Lindsay, Obama was an enormously appealing figure at first glance who, if you looked more closely, had done nothing before coming to power except deliver sonorous speeches. And, for all the differences between a mayor and a president, both leaders presided over social fragmentation, middle-class decline and manufacturing losses. On Obama’s watch, especially after Ferguson, the country became dangerously divided along racial and ideological lines, and it’s that fragmentation that allowed for Trump.

I’ll bite my tongue, cede the old man the last word here and take that up at our next dinner at the same table we sat around when I was 14 and our family arguments started in earnest. I’m maybe five years away now from really finding out what my parents meant when they joked (right, mom?) about what I was in for if I ended up with a kid like me.

I’m looking forward, nervously, to hearing my daughters enlighten me about everything that I’ve been ignorant of and blind to. And then, maybe, finding out if I manage to learn much over the next 10 years.

To Voicer Wayne Nuhn: Joe Biden was just repeating what FBI Director Chris Wray was saying about Antifa, that it is an ideology. Antifa has no leader, no headquarters and no hierarchy. All the evidence I’ve seen so far points to right-wing supremacists.

Cause for concern

Who won the first presidential debate? Certainly not my three kids, each of whom is full of life but anxious about the future. They, along with millions of other young people, are America’s hope for a brighter future. I can’t imagine what kind of a world they will inherit, but I do know this: This country’s future depends on what happens on Election Day in November.

Late, great

Taking a respite from politics, I nominate Chadwick Bozeman for of Time magazine’s 2020 Person of the Year. He deserves this honor not only for his talent, but for his unswerving service to others, and for his courage in the face of death.

Bayonne: Oct. 9 is John Lennon’s birthday. He would have been 80

Fond farewell

After 84 years, New Corner Restaurant in Brooklyn is closing due to these uncertain COVID times. A Brooklyn staple where families gathered for every occasion, and just a real oldschool dinner. Unpretentious, best servers, great food, welcoming atmosphere. I don’t need to convince you; 84 years did. Good luck and thanks to the Colandrea family for making everyone feel welcomed and fed.