摘要：I was born in 1942. I come from an upper-middle class, but not wealthy, familydescribed by my mother as ‘impoverished gentry’. My father was an architect—not afirm architect; he was in business for himself—and my mother worked in a publishinghouse as a reader. That was her day job; she was also a poet and a painter. They wereboth cultivated Stevenson Democrats,1 both young and in their twenties during the NewDeal and strongly committed to the idea of an anti-Communist model of progressivepolitics with a strong sense that class and poverty and race were the fundamentalpolitical issues.My political experiences began with these Stevenson-style Democratic commitmentsat home. I went to a progressive elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts andmy first moments of political rebellion were rebellions against the various authoritarianundercurrents of this ultra-progressive participatory environment. This is important, asmy whole political life has been much more organised against liberalism than againstconservatism. I still see mainstream American liberalism, even in its decline, as onlysporadically a positive political force and more often as deeply problematic.
