Liberals today are being shamed, once again, by their connivance with the forces of hierarchy and money. They trumpeted their victory over the Soviet Union in 1989 but corrupted it through government of, by and for elites, an endless series of centrist political compromises, and the enthronement of neoliberal economics.
Those who “took the trouble to cast off the comfortable veil of selfish complacency” would see “a prosperity that is only apparent”, some European observers wrote in the 1840s, of a similar moment. Beneath the appearance of bourgeois order there lurked profound discontent – and revolutionary threat. In 1848, that threat awakened. Is our 1848 coming?
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