Us on Progressive Radio
Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, interviewed Liza & me when we were in Madison for his radio show. Here it is:
Posted on February 26, 2011 by Doug Henwood
Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, interviewed Liza & me when we were in Madison for his radio show. Here it is:
Category: announcement, self-promotion Tags: Interview, Liza Featherstone, Matt Rothschild
LBO News from Doug Henwood
Barack Obama in the _Audacity of Hope_: “Reagan’s central insight–that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie–contained a good deal of truth.” If most progressives did not agree, then doesn’t their initial indulgence of Barack Obama suggest that most progressives just don’t do political economy? You rightly called out Naomi Klein for the shallowness of the Shock Doctrine, which made you an outlier (it seems to me). In other words, most progressives prefer to outsource.
Duncan Foley said that what you get out of a crisis depends on what you bring in. I honestly didn’t see much coming into this crisis from progressives. I did see support for and deference to the Democrats, who brought market liberalism and technocracy. The noxious hybrid in that defining policy of the Obama administration is education reform. Race to the Top emulates market discipline, and testing is a means to “measure what you treasure” for technocratic excellence.
Peter Dorman has spoken against this weakness of the contemporary American left:
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2010/11/two-inside-jobs.html
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2010/11/embarrassed-by-left.html
Rothschild still thinks the obama moment was celebratory – why bother asking all the subsequent questions about ‘what happened?’ abandon illusions is a great slogan…