Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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66 politics and governance
fi nancial mediocrity, and political suicide” (pp. 201–204, 212). True
conservatism, as a result, “withered and died” long ago (p. 207) and
descended into anger, stereotyping, sloganeering, myth-making, and
“frightening simple-mindedness” (p. 209). Written a half century
ago, those words were a harbinger of what was to come.
For its part, the liberalism that we associate with Franklin
Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy fell victim to tragic assassinations
and the Vietnam War and subsequently withered for lack of backbone
and vision. Franklin Roosevelt, still despised in some circles
for introducing Social Security, was the best friend capitalism ever
had; he was more of a pragmatic and creative conservative than
he was a socialist. In its heyday, between 1933 and 1968, however,
liberalism failed to mature into a robust, agile, and sustainable
movement. To accommodate corporate interests, liberals bent
with the political winds and often compromised the ideals of an
open, fair, and democratic society. The public quickly smelled fear
and defeatism, and if there is anything Americans don’t like it
is cowards and losers. Like conservatism, a full-blown liberalism
never took a fi rm hold in America.
As a result of failures on both right and left, our recent political
life and policies are strangely unrelated to the real challenges of the
long emergency looming ahead. A great deal of recent “neoconservatism”
was little more than an ideological veneer to cover a
hijacking of American politics by an unlikely coalition of neocon
buccaneers, theocons, right-wing extremists, old-line Republicans,
tax-cutters, corporations, the defense industry, and conservative
evangelicals (Linker, 2007). In order to shift the public agenda,
conservative donors spent an estimated $3 billion from 1970 to
2000 to create ideologically oriented think tanks and a network
of radio and television stations featuring dependably angry commentators
fulminating daily against treasonous liberals. Whatever
other religious or political values might have been involved, they
defl ected public attention from the largest transfer of wealth in history
from the middle and lower classes to the extremely wealthy.