He said:
For me the ironic part is that the “liberal” hillary clinton would have done these same things albeit perhaps not as quickly as trump is going to. And Hedges is correct as usual. The drums of war are already beating and I don’t refer to the farcical, self perpetuating war on “terrorism”. There are big bucks to be made by killing each other and I wager putin and trump have talked about that
And I replied:
Yes, and it is important that liberals announce with a kind of joy for the idea approach that true liberalism is about humanity, about joy itself, about the belief in the possibility of societies in which all share happiness. Approximations of such are what need demonstration, model communities that are neither socialist or capitalist but humane, organized for the welfare of all. Such places can only be created through interaction, through the exchange of what selves are about and what individuals want for themselves and those about whom they care, individuals hearing close up and personal about the selves who are others and of their needs and desires and notions of what constitutes good in life. Here begins the process of building, perhaps rebuilding if there is anything left of the old that is good enough to keep. And it is with education that the foundational understandings for building the new are created, education that celebrates the capacities of human brains, the power of the human brain to develop understandings of things so well as to produce the kind of knowledge that changes the circumstances of life, the possibility always there to create something better. The trouble is that we, human beings, have been made to disbelieve our human capacities, to understand our lives as shaped by circumstance only and not by the decisions we make moment to moment. Most of us do not believe much in our own capacity, as individual human beings, to affect reality in the present and into and for the future. This is a product of the kind of education Ivan Illich wished to get rid of by deschooling society, schooling that by causing individuals to understand that answers were always outside themselves, beyond their capacity to reason to good answers, dehumanized them and, by dehumanizing the individual caused him or her to regard others as something less than what they were, capacity wise, at least. As for liberal Hillary, she was so transparently illiberal that it had to be some kind of willful blindness that caused so many with liberal tendencies to see her as being anything like a real liberal. But she was the hope so many of the liberal leaning that it has to be clear that she and her minions have, over the years, redefined liberalism in a way that took most of the energy out of liberality, distorted the basic principles of true liberalism in order to make palatable a vile neoliberalism that made it seem as though it were possible to be corporatist and human at the same time. Hillary and Barbara and Chuck and Nancy, Obama and Biden too, sold a brand of hope that caused people to cheer the stock market and the market share of Whole Foods and Apple instead of those, like Hedges and that guy Chomsky, who were trying to say that these cheerleaders were cheering mostly for themselves, cheering on others to support the system that, left in place, would continue to deliver them a good share of the goodies at the expense of others whose only hope was to one day be on that cheerleading team receiving the perks of membership.
