Liberals Are Useless

Cover of Rules for Radicals

I am not sure what to think about Saul Alinsky. Forgive me for temporarily getting hysterical, I will pick up my argument after this point: our murderers most resemble their murderers, no how different we are from them. OK, tone done the hysteria, pick up the argument - those who would put politics over truth and those who would use propaganda most resemble the dissemblers on the other side.

It is better to be a radical than a liberal, because it is true what Jonathan Schwarz says "Conservatives like people with their hearts, liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts". But being that radical will be a much more quiet and background affair than a straightforward aping of Che Guevara's example (I am using Che Guevara's name just as a placeholder for any infamous radical you could choose. Knock yourself out, and pick your favorite infamous radical.)

Because the internal struggle will be the limiting factor on the care you will provide.

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Conservatives are more likely to use approaches that aid the exceptional individual. Liberals are more likely to use approaches that aid the marginalized group. True care to humans will synthesize both, even thought the two are often quite contradictory. When you need to synthesize the contradictory, you have no short cut, you have to explicitly synthesize the contradictory. Like far from shore, rowing a boat and bailing out a boat at the same time - if you stop either, you are lost - and no efficiency claimed on one of the pair can make up for the absence of the other.

The Eastern Philosophies often explicitly synthesize the contradictory. How mature and wise.

Liberals Are Useless - Tiny Revolution by Jonathan Schwarz: "
Chris Hedges said it, not me:

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

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I've thought something along these lines many times myself. In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky says: 'liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.' This is an absolutely critical insight about human nature, one which would change the life courses of many young liberals if they heard it. This may explain why it seems to appear almost nowhere online.
The one thing I'd add is that conservatives actually do like people with their hearts. So I think the saying should go: 'Conservatives like people with their hearts, liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.'
—Jonathan Schwarz
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