The Great Cat Massacre
Toolan, David
In brief The Neo-Liberals: Creating the New American Politics, by Randall Rothenberg. Simon and Schuster, $16.95, 287 pp. It was one thing for nineteenth-century atheists to proclaim the death of...
...But Rothenberg explains the neo-liberal case with such facility and zest that his own lucid criticisms and questions in the concluding chapter come none too soon...
...The book decodes their new jargon: investment, appropriate technology, and cooperation, with chapters on each term augmented by bits of dialogue and an interpretive translation...
...About which history politely asks: but will it fly...
...K.S.S...
...Today's death knell, as the political story goes, tolls for liberalism: the liberalism of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society variety...
...It was one thing for nineteenth-century atheists to proclaim the death of God, but another for twentieth-century theologians to do so...
...Or so it seemed until history undermined them both by documenting the stubborn persistence of religions boasting deities...
...In a lively style, Rothenberg describes who the neo-liberals are (from Gary Hart in the Senate to Charles Peters at the editor's desk...
...what they offer by way of critique and program...
...Stark as this reality is for the Democrats, the proposals suggested by the neo-liberals are tenuous, untested as they are, naive in parts, and laden by fifty years of coalition-building now looked upon as the albatross of special interest groups...
...Randall Rothenberg's book documents the rise of neo-liberalism, a movement of rather elite pragmatists who are attempting to build upon the ruins of liberal ideology what looks like the High-Tech Entrepreneurial Deal...
...why they lay claim to the appellation "liberal...
...All the same, there may be something here...
...These three basic tenets are fitted into a larger context, the present vacuous state of Democratic party politics in face of the victorious Republican creed of government: the less the better...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 7
