What you're doing

Consider: FDR, with a communist left agitating on one side, seemed pretty centrist when he came up with the New Deal. But the Democrats purged the communists, and the right-wing turned communism, and even socialism, into such dirty words that the next generation pretty much bought into it. By the '60s, when anti-war, pro-civil rights activists were accused of being led by the old left communists, the response was that we had nothing to do with them - we "don't trust anyone over 30." (Yes, that is the original context for that quote.) The right-wing's class war against the rest of us was on. Since then we have had the long years of ridicule of not just hippies and anti-war activists, but of liberals who simply want to retain the New Deal - and sure enough, with this the new dirty word, we see "progressives" who are taking the... [read full story]