I think things *have* changed since the 1960s, in ways that very few writers have begun to grasp--Michael Moore, in his own way, is one, and he has only hinted at what's going on in the working class now. I think people's attitudes and political values are up for grabs now in a way that's unprecedented in our lifetimes. It's akin to the midwestern populist movement of the late 19th century; there is only the most diffuse sense of who the enemy is, but there is an emphatic sense of having been duped. And since there is scarcely any *political* language for discussing what's wrong--the Gingrich/Clinton "big government"-bashing line is about it--you see it coming out sideways in odd places: like the recovered memory movement of the early '90s, which always seemed to me in one sense a displacement of what is better understood as political alienation. ---------- From: Carl Remick Sent: Thursday, September 03, 1998 10:00 AM To: 'lbo-talk at lists.panix.com' Subject: RE: Kautsky parle
Re W. Kiernan's: "I never found it hard at all to explain leftish ideas to the relatively low-paid construction workers I worked with, even when they started out with all kinds of really dumb, massmedia-built political preconceptions."
Maybe things have changed over the last three decades, but the image that always sticks in my mind is construction workers beating up antiwar protesters during the Vietnam War, affirming their solidarity with Nixon & Co.
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