<...Do you really believe, as my older daughter
cynically claims to, that 'if voting could make a
difference, it would be illegal'?
<snip>
If even the Religious Reich could be successful on the
local level despite such a dystonic message that they
had to lie about it...surely the left could define an
appealing, workable platform and capture first local,
then regional, and finally national offices. Why
aren't we working on that?
Or is it that we 'inteligentsiya' truly are
intellectually arrogant, stagnant, bankrupt, and have
nothing to offer working folk except a dystopic reprise
of Soviet-style 'paradise'? Should we admit that we
have nothing to offer but obfuscatory, hypertheoretical
criticism? Pack up and go home, sort of thing?>
You also mentioned Chomsky and his views on the potential power of the ballot in societies like ours. He mentions often how he thinks the people are ripe for hearing different solutions to our problems...anything other than, well, it's not perfect, but capitalism is really the best way for humanity to live. Really. It is. Any other system would be far worse. Well, are they? The working class has had it's collective butt kicked all over the place in the past 25 years. Millions of good paying jobs for people with less than an advanced degree in computer science have vanished. Wealth inequality is staggering in this society. Millions of people struggle from paycheck to paycheck, nothing left for savings, basic housing and transportation is ruinously expensive for millions, the only reason millions of others are living a middle class lifestyle is because they have two incomes and incredible levels of household debt at usurous interest rates. In order to have one of those scarce, better paying jobs, people are working ridiculous hours, or they're holding down two or three jobs, commuting hours on end, some even live away from their families most of the time. Routine medical and dental care is unaffordable for millions, in some cases even if there is some insurance. The society has gotten less crime-ridden in certain respects in the past few years, by virtue of the fact that poor people have been locked up wholesale. (The mushrooming, the explosion of the incarceration system is something that is scaring the shit out of me. It has become a staple of our economic system, providing jobs to replace those that have gone away. Once you've built new prisons, to keep people employed you've got to keep them going. You keep them going by locking up people. And there's the cheap prison labor (legalized slavery) provided by these fine institutions.) And there's the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, the unacknowledged class war, the Empire...
Upshot is, we got trouble right here in River City. The people on this list all know all this.
So WHY can't left/progressive forces seem to get the time of day? You'd think people would be so pissed off by this state of affairs that it would be easy. Fuck the corporate media; I work for it, and it doesn't have the sway some believe it does with people in general. Does Margaret have a point?...that much, if not most, of the Left truly has no desirable vision to offer our society that would be an improvement on what we have now? Is it a matter of many Americans having become so atomized at this point that they can't conceive of effective collective action anymore? And many others have simply given up? Is the downfall of the Left the fact that it's too idealistic? Are we not being realistic, and is that what turns people off?
I am sincere in these wonderings. I wonder if there is hope.