myths

In the milder last years of the Franco era in Spain, with the regime doing more appealing than dictating to the public, roadside signs went up warning of wildfires: “When the Forest Burns It Is Your Forest Burning.” Soon a derisive “Sir Count!” could be read scrawled at the end of one of them. … [Read more]

Eric Alterman demolishes myths about liberalism in the spirited polemic Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America in which his goal is to rescue liberalism from the calumnies that currently define it and thereby free Americans to embrace the label whose politics majorities of them already believe.

Alterman defines and defends liberalism, while disposing of the caricatured portrayals adopted in recent decades, particularly during the Bush years. The future, he argues, belongs to liberals -