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Friday, December 17, 2021

Talkin Socialism: The Past is Prologue?

 At Years End, an Upbeat Goodbye To Plague Year II

From the Talkin Socialism team: 
We honor Scott Marshall's charge to lift our half full glasses!

Saturday morning, 10 AM Eastern Time.
Live on www.enlightenradio.org and
The Facebook Socialist Economics Group page.




Shakespeare's famous line from the Tempest, Act II, scene I.

The past is written , but the future is yours to wield, subject to the choices you decide to make. Make good ones. Each day is a new day with no mistakes in it yet.

Our discussion opens with a closing excerpt from
Robert Putnam's The Upswing






"Throughout this book we have argued that although America’s “we” had gradually become more capacious during the first half of the twentieth century, and as we continued the long historical task of redressing racial and gender inequities, we were in 1960 (and still are) very far from perfection on those dimensions. Americans could have and should have pushed further toward greater equality. Therefore the lessons of history that we glean from the I-we-I century are two-sided: We learn that once before Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess like the one we’re in now, but we also learn that in that first Progressive Era and the decades that followed we didn’t set our sights high enough for what the “we” could really be, and we didn’t take seriously enough the challenge of full inclusion. Therefore, the question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both."








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