I wish I could say "I don't understand how one could embrace liberal capitalism in 2014", but I can't. Though I suspect I was always a radical at heart, I embraced left-progressive thought for most of my period of political self-awareness. I believed that the Democrats really did have the best interests of the average and underprivileged American in mind (and only embraced support and money from big banks and corporations out of pragmatism), that the fight for LGBT rights was the final fight for equal rights, and that inevitable progress was only being slowed by the Republicans, that efforts to encourage "entrepreneurship" and promote democracy in the developing world were benevolent acts of kindness, and that "properly regulated" capitalism was a global force for good.
Now I don't. I recognize now that all of human history has been and is shaped by our ever-expanding demand for basic needs and commodities, and despite the failures (as well as the successes) of past socialist experiments, that the promise of a society where working men and women receive the full value of their labor rather than seeing it siphoned away by the parasites above them, where no child goes hungry or is unable to receive proper medical care or education, where the earth and its natural resources treated as public property rather than under private ownership, will never die.
