This might shock you but in a way this saddens me, liberalism gives me something to dislike and gripe about, so I don't want it to die, but to become
irrelevant now that would be ok....
LOSING OUR DELUSIONS.
Not Much Left
I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in the early 1960s, the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead.
Conservatism, he said, was "bookless," a characteristic Galbraithian, which is to say Olympian, verdict. Without books, there are no ideas. And it
is true: American conservatism was, at the time, a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled
swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell
Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual who, as Clinton Rossiter (himself a moderate conservative) wrote, has "begun to sound like a
man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country."
At this point in history, it is liberalism upon which such judgments are rendered. And understandably so. It is liberalism that is now bookless and
dying. The most penetrating thinker of the old liberalism, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is virtually unknown in the circles within
which he once spoke and listened, perhaps because he held a gloomy view of human nature. However gripping his illuminations, however much they may
have been validated by history, liberals have no patience for such pessimism. So who has replaced Niebuhr, the once-commanding tribune to both town
and gown? It's as if no one even tries to fill the vacuum. Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point
and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus. In any case, it is the apparatus that is designed to persuade, not the idea.
Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are
read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans
aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country.
LINK
). When a Republican gov't expands the US federal gov't
more then at any time in modern history you gotta wonder(Dept of Homeland 'Security'). I have always found it quite amusing that the political
situation(in US) has degenerated to the point where if you aren't a Conservative your a Liberal. :barf
it also goes the other way too
unfortunately...) That smacks on Linear two-dimensional thinking and it's sad things have come so far. In another 10-20 years Conservatism will be
declared "Dead" and the cycle of powersharing between the Elite will continue, over and over again.................. 
