Wrong for all the right reasons

There was a time, in this century, when liberals championed the working class, when Democrats were indisputably the party of those who worked rather than invested for a living. Today, however, most Americans have come to see liberals as drifting and aimless, somehow lacking in backbone and moral fiber, beholden to radical ideologies that have little to do with the average American's life. Few incidents cast this phenomenon into greater relief than George Bush's successful tarring of Michael Dukakis as a liberal in 1988 - and, tellingly, Dukakis's subsequent flight from the liberal tradition. How has it come to this? Why have liberals allowed themselves to be so portrayed? In this book, Gordon MacInnes - state senator, fiscal conservative, frustrated Democrat, and a man who believes deeply in America's civic culture - reveals how progressive forces have retreated from the battle of ideas, at great cost. Squarely at the nexus of race, poverty, and politics, Wrong for All the Right Reasons charts the sources of liberal decline and the high costs of conservative rule. Tracing the origins of the liberal retreat to the fallout from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family, MacInnes claims that white liberals have somewhere along the way stopped taking black people seriously enough to argue with them. Taking in by the solidarity-over-debate approach of the Radical left and overwhelmed by the shrewd propaganda of the conservative Right, liberals have been continuously on the defensive for decades, unable to forge an aggressive, proactive agenda of their own to address the needs of working-class and poor Americans. This has led to a breakdown of honest dialogue that to this day continues to plague liberal Democrats.