Word: leftism
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...Pinochet's supporters, who still make up about half of Chilean society, insist the moustached dictator was himself a product of Latin America's other notorious extreme: intolerant leftism. Their point is at least half valid. Salvador Allende, the left-wing Chilean President whom the military ousted and probably killed, hardly shared Pinochet's bloodlust; but his government had indeed run Marxist-amuck by 1973. The economy was in state-run free fall and radical but influential leftist groups were calling for (if not already trying to carry out) an armed shift to Cuba-style communism. Pinochet always asserted that...
...left-leaning loyalties were hard to sustain through the malaise of the late seventies. In the 1980 election, during my year as Crimson editorial chairman, in a final gasp of last-ditch leftism, we endorsed the maverick candidacy of Barry Commoner. Having criticized what we saw as the Carter administration’s dangerous and ineffective turn to the right in the aftermath of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we thought that endorsing the Democrat would be hypocritical. For our purity, we got eight years of Ronald Reagan...
...Perhaps an even more important factor is populist backing: leftism is on the rise again in Latin America for a reason, namely the burgeoning feeling around the region that a decade of U.S.-backed capitalist reforms has simply widened an already epic gap between rich and poor-and that the Bush Administration is indifferent to it. As Chavez uses his multi-billion-dollar oil revenues to fund the kind of social projects that Venezuela's legions of impoverished never saw from his kleptocratic predecessors-and to subsidize cheaper oil for his cash-strapped Latin neighbors-more people are willing...
...more to ideological allies like China, are hardly comforting as gas nears $3 per gallon. But neither is Chavez's embrace of nations like Iran, and nor is the fact that he's leading a politically potent (and, to the Bush Administration, potentially destabilizing) wave of angry neo-leftism in Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico...
...forget the leftism vs. centrism dispute. To become the majority party again, Democrats must redefine the values debate and show a willingness to innovate as they translate progressive values into a vision that inspires the nation...