Jane Smiley Quotes
Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
The liberals of the Republican party had been the powerful and often dominant wing of the party since Theodore Roosevelt had instituted his reformism. Rockefeller was trying to maintain its preeminence inside the party against the then new Republican extremists led by Barry Goldwater. He lost at the convention, as Goldwater was nominated as the Presidential candidate. He was trounced in the general election because of his extreme form of Conservatism. However, while the extreme right wingers lost the election, they had won control of the Republican Party that defined Republicanism for decades thereafter as a conservative movement. They would make “liberalism” a dirty word, and the party did not concern itself with human need much thereafter while fighting the change and globalization that was beginning.
Most people wrongly believe that President Lyndon Baines Johnson whose centerpiece of his administration was the “Great Society” also coined the term or at least one of his assistants did. However, it was used in writing over 50 years earlier by this Englishman.
Friedman was commenting in particular about Egypt and other Arab societies.
1st Viscount Snowden. This quotation is particularly interesting in that we have an early 20th century socialist acknowledging that one of the objectives of Socialism is to increase the individual’s dependency on the state. By the late 19th century, few socialists if any saw this as an objective of socialism. However, this dependency objective is one of the attack points of conservatives who assume that this is a result of socialism whether or not it was intended.
His indictment was rejected by the American voters when they rejected Ryan and Mitte Romney in the election of 2012. This quotation illustrates one of the problems of ideology in politics. Ryan “indicted” everything about progressivism in effect saying to the voters that there is not one progressive idea or analysis that might be useful or even important to the body politic. The same thing happens when ideologues on the left claim that there is nothing of value in conservative thinking. In reality many of the greatest facets of America can be traced to progressive ideas and many to conservative ideas. The United States has been an amalgam of political ideas taken from the entire range of human thinking the world over.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
