David Gregory, who is even more pro-corporate than his predecessor the
late Tim Russert, just asked his panel of economic experts the final
question in the opening segment of this very high-profile
inside-the-beltway TV news show:
"Does capitalism have a future?"
We have certainly come a long way since this:
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm
Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?"
The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to
liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's
language, asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental
contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that
between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the
chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class
issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Kojève
(among others) noted, the egalitarianism of modern America represents
the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx.
This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the
United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent
years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with
the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains
fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as
with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it
up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions.
Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of
liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and racism" which
persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.
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