This is fairly patronizing stuff, particularly the part which suggests that the people on the streets couldn't figure out why they wanted to be there on their own, without having digested the blizzard of pre-WTO prose poured out by the elite commentators. That said, the point is really to resist and, in fact, rend asunder, the very type of coalition that John Nichols, the EPI folks, Mark Ritchie, the AFL apologists and some of the Naderites want to force upon us. Namely, to merge the "fix it" and "nix it" factions. That will only result in the inevitable "consensus brokered" pseudo-fix-it side-bar working-group solution, which we have endured over and over again, on trade, on the environment, on the budget, on gays in the military, et al., like Bill Murry in a political version of the movie Groundhog's Day. [If only Henry Liu were still around to give the likes of Dolan the drubbing they deserve for their racially-charged denunciations of China.]--jsc
> I'm no antismoking zealot, so I can't get behind Mark's tobacco
> policing. But I find this notion that the only authentic place to be
> is at the "frontlines" a little disturbing. Why not a division of
> labor in a coalition? Why not ideological differences in a coalition?
> What kind of organization should exist behind and beyond the
> frontlines? What do people think about on the frontlines, and how do
> they know what they're fighting for? What should they do if they win,
> or lose, or draw? Enforcement of authenticity is at least as
> problematic as enforcing of no smoking laws.
>
> Doug