The Guardian: Big idea

James Harkin:

A fortnight after it charged forth from behind the fetid turrets of the blogosphere into real life, arguments about the Euston Manifesto still ricochet around the worldwide web. Named after the London road where the plotters met in a pub (O’Neill’s), the manifesto is a political movement born out of frustration among sections of the left with the anti-war movement. Prominent bloggers, journalists, activists and academics, including my Guardian colleague Norman Johnson, have already lent it their support.

The Euston Manifesto is a tiny alliance, but one indicative of a broader shifting of intellectual chairs. To their critics they are known as “muscular liberals”—to distinguish them, presumably, from the flabby and weak-willed ones. But there is much that is useful and spirited about their manifesto—the signatories score some eloquent points against the left’s opportunistic flirtation with radical Islam, its lazy anti-Americanism, and its retreat into flaccid relativism. Nor does it make any sense to label them as neoconservatives and apologists for American imperialism. The American neoconservative right and the Eustonian left might have arrived at similar positions, but they did so from vastly different premises and backgrounds.

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