The Future of the Left in the 21st Century (Part 3) – Merit, biology, and patriotic realism.
Ruy Teixeira – This is the final part of a three-part series on the future of the left in the 21st century (the first part is here and the second part is here). My basic thesis is that the left’s project in the first quarter of the 21st century has failed and that a left project for the second quarter of this century must be based on core principles that break with the failures of the last 25 years.
Those principles must be based on the fundamental fact that the left has lost touch with baseline realities of how to reach ordinary working-class voters, what policies could actually deliver what these voters want and what kind of politics accords with these voters’ common sense rather than the biases of their professional-class base. They should provide a drastic course-correction toward realism to give the left a serious chance of decisively defeating right populism and achieving the good society they claim they are committed to. Continue reading
David Solway – Everywhere we look, the principle of merit is compromised or regarded as the worst form of unfairness. Sanctioned mediocrity is now the order of the day. Standards of achievement are diluted, hard work goes unacknowledged, and the desire to excel in one’s field or to accept responsibility for one’s actions and even for one’s failures is in abeyance. Individual talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial success, and personal discipline are dismissed as unjust advantages deriving from the exploitation of the dispossessed. “You didn’t build that,” as Obama notoriously