>the relentless critique crowd
>never seems to have anything else to offer, accept some vague claim that
>it'll be all better once we get rid of capitalism.
You're the one blaming "capitalism" for our political torpor, not me. You could easily criticize me for being timid, bourgeois even, for paying so much attention to legal structures.
Margaret wrote:
>Perfection-or-nothing positions may warm the cockles
>(and mussels) of our self-satisfaction, but they do
>little good in the real world. And if we're not
>trying to do good in the real world, what the hell kind
>of socialists are we, anyway?
Would you please tell me how a critique of the U.S. Constitution and the machinery it has spawned is a "perfection-or-nothing" position, a departure from the "real world," a term that's not very clear in this context, but has some suggestion of the status quo? If you're trying to figure out why the U.S. has the most depoliticized political discourse in the known world, isn't the institutional struture of the place worth examining? Isn't it worth pointing out that the damn near impregnable rule of money was actually a design feature?
Doug