The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #68815 Message #1417710
Posted By: robomatic
22-Feb-05 - 02:24 PM
Thread Name: BS: Origins of Liberal Thought
Subject: RE: BS: Origins of Liberal Thought
Amos:
I love "Democracy In America" by de Tocqueville. I think it is one of the most perceptive observations of this country, only equalled in our day by "The Simpsons" ;-).
I would add my opinion that one can think as de Tocqueville describes and come up with liberal or conservative views. His point was that Americans are not bound in their freedom of thought by considerations of class (As mack said: would that were (still) true).
There has been plenty of time for thoughts to get ossified (sp?) in all camps. We've recently seen a spate of outrage over a Colorado professor with tenure who had objectionable comments prepared on victims of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and here in Boston there are those who want to deprive the President of Harvard University of his position based on forum comments he made regarding the number of women in the sciences.
I think the terms of liberal 'versus' conservative has changed, both from what Gilbert and Sullivan meant in that wonderful song in Iolanthe:
"I often think it comical, fa la la fa la la
How nature always doth contrive
That every boy and every girl that's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative."
and the more generic terms in use in the United States where there was room for liberal thought in the Democratic Republicans, the Whigs, (probably not in the Know Nothings), and more recently in the Dems and Reps of the almost current era. I thing things have got a little more ossified with both Democratic Great Society programs which have outlived their usefulness, and Republican embracing of old tyme religion right out of "Inherit The Wind".
My point is that there is still a great majority of folk out there who resist stratification and are open to critical thought, color them how you may. Both are inheritors of the type of thinking described by Alexis de Tocqueville.