Clovers In The Atmosphere

Hope you return to your healthy, gravel-free self soon!
 

doncha hate it when your healthy, left-leaning lifestyle jumps out and bites you in the ass? :) heal quick!
 

I thought the article made an interesting point... we are drifting "rightward" because we are allowing ourselves as liberals to debate "conservative" issues, rather than sidestepping them and forcing conservatives to debate "liberal" issues.
 

Britt - Sorry to hear about your bike accident, I had one in the fall was amazed at how much it hurt!

I've always thought that David Brooks was sort of a poor man's Tom Wolfe, if Wolfe had stayed in journalism and not gone into fiction writing. I find his insights into the psychological bases of mundance behavior interesting, but he doesn't do a very good job of answering the question "so what?" Also, he loves Wal-Mart far more than any self-respecting person has a right to. I find those counties disgusting -- miles and miles of suburb with no character, nothing to distinguish them from any similar county in a different state. They have cheap housing because nobody used to want to live there, back when people valued community.

I find Brooks' characterization of the subrubs occasionally midleading. For instance, he says that 40% of African-Americans live in suburbs. Well, Buffalo for instance has a zoned suburb called Lackawanna (you may have heard of the movie Lackawanna Blues) which is heavily African-American. It borders the city, you literally cross the street and you're in Lackawanna. Nobody really considers it to be a suburb. When people refer to suburbs in the Buffalo area, they refer to lilly-white Amherst and Clarence, where for the most part the only significant minorities are highly educated Asians. Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other cities like that have 'suburbs' that are so old and close to the city that nobody considers them suburbs, just part of the metropolitan area. The real suburbs are a lot different.
 

The problem liberals have today is that traditional 1960s-era liberalism was and is very very uncomfortable with the free market. It's difficult to argue for, say, government-run health care and a large welfare state when counties with these policies have long waits for basic medical procedures and chronic unemployment.

Conservatives love to ignore problems with the American economy, but that doesn't make them wrong when they point fingers at France and how poorly the regulated French economy serves the people there, especially the poor and immigrants.

I'm increasingly realizing that my "liberalism" is really more libertarian than anything else, although unlike most "conservative" libertarians I recognize that there are economic externalities that can only be corrected through government action. (Social security, health care, the environment, traffic, etc.)

I'm not going to start voting Republican anytime soon, but I'm all too happy to see the Democratic party moving to the "right" on unions, free trade, and other free-market issues where the government does more harm than good.
 

Patch, I tend to agree with you. I'm far more liberal on social issues than on economic and social policy issues, I think a lot of liberals of our generation are the same way.