A prominent liberal intellectual says big government liberalism must be abandoned

Even while we’ve been talking about the conversion from liberalism to conservatism of playwright David Mamet, who has never been particularly known as a political writer and therefore his conversion is not exactly earth-shaking, an apparently much more significant such conversion is being declared. The liberal thinker Walter Russell Mead, writing at The American Interest, argues that progressivism has reached the point where it is about to “jump the shark,” an event that will announce its inevitable doom. Switching his metaphors and piling metaphor upon metaphor, Mead says that big government liberalism has gone from being the Great White Hope, to the Great White Elephant (i.e. increasingly dysfunctional), to the Great White Shark (i.e. a force of tyranny and destruction). He concludes his close-to-apocalyptic article thus:

We cannot throw away the hopes with which we have been entrusted in a futile effort to sustain insupportable programs under the shadow of bankruptcy and collapse.

We are approaching the time when the false promises can no longer be sustained. There is a little time left…. We can still act to conserve the essential accomplishments of the progressive era while preparing to move beyond it. But only aggressive and accelerating reform can make that happen. It needs to begin soon. The money is running out.

The American government must not jump the shark.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 13, 2011 09:04 PM | Send