> So do you agree with Yoshie when she "agrees wholeheartedly with
> Carrol on the stupidity of Cockburn dreaming of 'a populist coalition
> of left and right on basic issues of liberty'"? I assume by Yoshie's
> criteria, your brother is on "the right", and apparently unreachable
> by those on "the left" on these basic issues. What do you think?
Every activist I have ever known in their practical daily work takes each person as they come to him or her. And meeting up with such a person as Michael's brother I/we/they would of course work with him. I have worked with a variety of people in the past, and shall do so in the future if I live long enough. In particular, I'm the president of the Depressive and Manic Depressive Support Group in Bloomington/Normal Illinois and constantly work sympathetically with other mentally ill people (all too many of whom are also captives of religion).
But on a maillist we necessarily speak in abstract categories. And however many individual exceptions there almost certainly are in any group you wish to name, certain sectors of the population are simply *not* reasonable targets of organized attempts to reach them. For example: the population of Arthur, Illinois -- simply because there are not enough of them. I would also disagree with Katha, for example, that Hitchens's columns in Vanity Fair would be apt to have any particular political effect. If you want to, you can pick the most thinly populated county in Nevada and spend the rest of your life trying to recruit radicals there. You might even find one or two. But you would also be (politically speaking) a damn fool.
My great uncle organized sheep herders in Montana for the IWW. And at the time it was a quite reasonable application of political effort. I doubt that it would make much sense today. Prisons, on the other hand, are probably a potentially very fruitful field for political agitation. That is why I keep urging people on these lists to check out the prisoner edited journal, *Prison Legal News*.
In another post, Brad De Long writes:
> But there was an awful lot more to populism than that [anti-semitism]
Of course there was. There was/is an awful lot more to almost any group or even individual that one can name. What is at issue is the predominant tendency of those political currents and politically active groups (now and in the past) that we call populist. Who knows -- perhaps if a dozen of us moved to Arthur Illinois we would end up recruiting the Lenin or Luxemburg or both of the American Revolution. It doesn't seem likely. And what the anti-populists in this thread are arguing is that there is a high likelihood of politics going bad if they focus on finance and money. Examples to the contrary (which are bound to exist) aren't really very relevant.
Carrol