JAMES KUNSTLER: Progress

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism? The notion of Progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.

Progressivism also may have been fatally tied to the accompanying reality of robust industrial economic growth, which itself was tied to abundant new energy resources, mainly oil. The belief that more of everything would become available raised the moral issue of allocating it fairly. Since we now face declining energy resources, and perhaps long-range economic contraction, we would appear to also now face the awful task of allocating less of everything -- which may be as impossible in practice as it sounds.

So the question now might be: what kind of economic justice is possible?

The group that used to composed the broad American middle class of industrial workers and managers is disintegrating economically. What will concern them in the years just ahead will be their ability to barely hang on to what they've got, including the roofs over their heads and their health. They will be in no mood for a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3530

[villager]

1. thanks -- just read this and forwarded it...

n/t

[Tace]

2. I'm Interested In The Similarlies, And Differences, Between Classic

Progressivism and the new Progresive movement. Kunstler offers some insight into that.

[villager]

4. right -- "post materialism" progressivism...

or however we'll come to think of it...

[onenote]

3. of course some people here would denounce Kunstler as racist

since he used the the term "tarbaby" to describe the Iraq war.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2005/11/stay_or_go.html

"This whole spectacle -- both the inept war itself and our debate about it here at home -- is particularly shameful for the official opposition, my party, the Democrats, because we could be talking about the so-called elephant-in-the-room, namely how we live in America and the tragic choices we've made, and the things we might do to change that -- but the party leadership is too brain-dead or craven to do that. As long as we don't, we're going to be wrassling a tarbaby in the Middle East."

onenote