Books and
Cooks West
June 2004
Blood of the Liberals by George Packer
Blood of the Liberals
by George Packer
Jared and Dawn's place
Sunday, June 25 at 5:30 PM
Homemade pizza, salad, fresh fruit, red wine, French silk pie
Our rating: 3.4 cups of tea!
From Publishers Weekly
Journalist and novelist Packer
(Central Square) illuminates the evolution of American liberalism by
examining three generations of family history in this thoughtful,
rueful work. Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston
(1869-1960), called himself "a Thomas Jefferson Democrat" and, as an
Alabama congressman from 1915 to 1937, fought for the rights of poor
people against the increasing power of big business. The author's
father, Herbert Packer (1926-1972), member of the new intellectual
middle class risen from impoverished immigrant roots, believed in the
power of a liberal federal government run by educated professionals to
foster a fairer society. Yet Huddleston ended his career as an anti-New
Deal conservative, and Herbert Packer committed suicide three years
after a stroke brought on in part by his conflicts as a Stanford
University administrator with radical students who saw the rule of
reason, in which he so fervently believed, as a facade erected by the
military-industrial machine. The author, born in 1960, came of age in a
society where liberalism was "the L word," the creed of elitists and
losers. The liberal postwar order, he notes, "replaced economic issues,
on which Democrats had been winning for two decades, with social ones,
on which Republicans would win for most of the next four." Politics is
now so discredited that "we're left to put our faith in God and the
market, a pair of invisible hands." Yet even as he perceptively
analyzes liberalism's failings (with appropriate attention devoted to
the personal particularities of his own family), Packer pays cogent
tribute to the passion for racial and economic justice that are its
lasting legacy. "The liberal impulse," he asserts in a moving
conclusion, "still beats somewhere under our skin."
