>Everything about this thread has pissed me off, from the way Doug framed the
>question yesterday, which among other things called upon my and Jonathan's
>previous polemics about race as a way to "liven things up",
Oh c'mon. I'm not sure exactly what you mean here - the "called upon...as a way to" doesn't parse - but if you think I was demeaning your contributions, you're wrong. I wasn't.
>And what you try to teach - there is nothing simple about this, I'm certainly
>not claiming that the left succeeded in doing this in 1988 or anything,
>but we
>can learn I hope - is that Jackson is worth listening to because he says some
>true things, he reaches out to a lot of people, voting for him is a
>reasonable
>thing to do in its tiny little local meaning, but the ultimate solution for
>changing the world has nothing to do with voting for Jackson, it has to do
>with
>everyone of us becoming Jackson, and becoming better than Jackson. That's a
>radical political practice.
Isn't Jackson exactly the problem, with both church-based politics and the Democrats, all rolled up into one? Here's a guy who claims, more or less, that God told him to run for president. That immediately comes with a whole messianic, hierarchical structure attached to it - the very opposite of a democratic radical politics, but one that fits nicely with what Adolph Reed calls the model of elite racial brokerage: Jesse, ordained by God to speak for African-Americans, becomes their spokesman-dealmaker. Of course, Jackson said a lot of good things, and got lots of good people energized - only to leave them hanging. When he had the chance to break from the Dems in 1988 he didn't, of course. So his main role, politically, has been to bind people to the hellish Democratic Party, while delivering millions of new registrants for Bill Clinton. And one reason he was able to get away with this was because of the institutional and spiritual authority of the church.
Doug