Strange death of liberal America

From the London Review of Books (Sept. 21) here’s how the piece, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” by Tony Judt starts:

“Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

It wasn’t always so...”

In this scholarly article author/historian Tony Judt examines what he calls “the strange death of liberal America.”

It took The Depression of the 1930s to pull all sorts of dreamers and activists together to create the liberal body of thought that coalesced to push America through the New Deal and the Civil Rights Era. The boldest Democrats of those times led those movements to make America better than it was before.

Today, many modern Democrats seem to be running away from that glorious record, afraid to be called liberals. Too bad. Reading Judt’s piece makes me think the baton has been dropped.