One of the episodes while I was midway from my position as run-of-the-mill-Democrat-Liberal to marxist was a merely academic affair in which the departmental salary committee on which I served was faced with a lame-duck chair (who was also a fucking idiot). The events that followed did more to permanently wreck my "career" than either my subsequent loud communist views or my clinical depression. The Committee made the mistake in compromising in advance, submitting reccommendations to the College Committee which represented, we thought, a reasonable compromise between the chair's demands and our preferences. The College Committe merely split the difference, at which point we flipped, etc. etc. etc. Everything I have experienced since, either in my own actual political practice or in 30 years of fairly extensive reading in political history has confirmed the nature of our mistake.
To translate this into a few major issues of the last 30 years.
(1) Abortion. The "Choice" defense was a compromise in advance and bound to lose eventually. The demand from the very beginning should have been an absolute demand for free abortion on demand with no queries as to motives. We would have ended up with a much more secure "Choice" system.
(2) The ERA Amendment. That movement got up steam because women were acting powerfully unpredictable and outlandish. As soon as it got through Congress the Women's Movement turned respectable, and when they should have been throwing stink bombs at state legislators and putting sugar in their gas tanks they begin sending polite delegations to "lobby" legislators. The delegation from Bloomington to Springfield (this is in Illinois) even let a state representative (Democrat) race bait them. Of course they lost in Illinois (the key state, incidentally).
(3) Now Max's idiotic ideas on Social Security. He has estimated what is "practical" to ask for -- i.e., he has given up the fight in advance, inviting the lime in the White House and Congress to gut the system by indicating that of course he wouldn't be so wildly impractical as to ask for the most obvious and simplest ways for "saving" the system (which, thank you, doesn't need saving, but must be blown up to save it nevertheless). What defenders of social security (if they/we existed in any organized way) ought to demand is something on the order of an exclusion of the firt %50,000 of wages from the employee's (but not from the employer's) tax payments, an elimination of any cap whatsoever, and the extension of the social security tax to all income (over $50,000 gross), earned or unearned. OH, also, immediate raising of the minimum social security pension (wage earner, spouse, or disabled child) to, say, $75,000. Then we might just end up with something at least not too much worse than what we have.
THe left depends on the existence of 10s of thousands of people like Max Sawicky, honest and committed liberals with the liberal delusion that all one needs to do is prove the need and possibility of something (forgetting that an appeal to reason is about a 5% appeal to reality). Such people in fact produce most of the ammunition that the left can use to load its political weapons. But nevertheless, sometimes (and re social security is one of those times) such liberals do act as though they were fucking paid agents of the Business Round Table or The Council on Foreign Relations. |;)
Carrol