Anti-Climacus

LINK: Kevin Yaroch has an interesting post about keeping the 'Liberal' in 'liberal democracy.'

My own research into the subject indicates to me that the shift in liberal thought occurred somewhere around 1968, at which point the rising stars on the left began to be wary of anything that looked too much like democracy promotion. There's a tendency amongst the better parts of the left at the moment (the Dissent crowd would be on my short list here) to leap back a generation or two to get people who have relevant things to say today. My list would include George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Hubert Humphrey, Irving Howe, and some (but by no means all) of the essays of Mary McCarthy. I tend to find what all of them had to say about the foreign policy situation in the 30s-50s to be incredibly relevant to the world today. Liberalism as such would do well to rediscover them.