Summer time reading

Kicking off this glorious 4th of July weekend with an excerpt of Walter Russel Mead's essay, "The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown".

4. The old left is dead.

Not even a global economic crisis can breathe new life into the world of Marxian socialism. Not only have most European countries moved to the right since the crash; the developing world has not seen any serious revival of ‘proletarian socialism’ in response to hard times. The world’s surviving ‘communist’ regimes continue to hold power by claiming credit for the successful management of increasingly capitalist economies. If you look hard, you can find a noisy fringe calling, say, for the nationalization of the banks or other old left responses to the crisis, and there are lots of places where people are protesting government austerity programs, but there is not a single free country in the world where serious political parties argue that socialist transformation will cure the economy’s ills. Increasingly, the politics of resistance and protest come from the right (and that isn’t always a good thing).

We're not sure what Mead meant by that last statement but in the essay there is a link to the Tea Party movement at "from the right". Stay tuned to see where Mead takes this as within the context of that last sentence, saying fiscal responsibility and limited government as being "from the right" is somewhat ham-fisted and inartful.