Is Cultural Liberalism getting in the way of Economic Equality movement? [View all]

[Joseph8th]

Eric Alterman (Nation) writing for the NYT makes the case that the liberal coalition has fractured along cultural lines... I can't say I entirely disagree, having watched the Occupy movement in Albuquerque disintegrate almost overnight into competing factions divided neatly along the usual liberal ideological lines -- race, religion, sexual orientation, even the cause of the Zapatistas takes priority over the cause of economic equality for all Americans regardless of all of the above...

Alterman concludes by criticizing the President for failing to take up the cause, too. But my question is: why would we expect him to do what we refuse to do? Isn't the way this works is we elect a POTUS, and then we hold his/her feet to the fire? Do we really expect Prez Obama to take a more strident position than we do? Or to even understand what we want from him? It seems to me that he's understood what we really want -- the end of DADT, the ACA, these are GREAT accomplishments that nobody (liberal) would deny or begrudge! -- and what we only SAID we wanted. OWS may have turned the national conversation to economic inequality, but ever since, the OWSers have largely lost interest and returned to focusing on the usual Identity Politics. To hell with all Americans. What can we get for Our Own?

What's your thoughts on this?

.... Caught in the crosswinds of so many simultaneous crises — I have not even mentioned Vietnam — many liberals chose to focus, rather perversely, on a “rights” agenda and the internecine fights it engendered within their increasingly fractured coalition. They lost sight of the essential element that had made the coalition possible in the first place: the sense that liberalism stood with the common man and woman in their struggle against economic forces too large and powerful to be faced by individuals on their own.

Liberals must find a way to combine their cultural successes with new approaches to achieving economic equality. But they must do so unambiguously and unequivocally. That brings us back to President Obama. The president often sounds as if he believes in a vigorous economic populism. .... But so far the president has been unwilling to put his budgetary moneys where his mouth is.

.... Liberals have spent decades trying to adjudicate the claims of their conflicting constituencies without focusing sharply enough on the economic well-being of a broad section of Americans. A fight for fairness and equity could unite the working poor and middle class in a winning coalition for the future, but the problem today for liberals is less the message itself than the credibility of the messenger.

While signaling his support for much if not all of liberalism’s cultural agenda, President Obama has occasionally tossed economic liberals a rhetorical bone — but he has also worried too much about deficit reduction. In this regard, Obama embodies the unsolved liberal conundrum. Were the president to embrace a genuinely populist economic agenda and mean it this time — just as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his second term — he might go a long way toward solving the problem that has dogged liberalism now for nearly half a century.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/cultural-liberalism-is-not-enough/?ref=opinion