> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Curiously enough, freerepublic.com is one of the leading sources of
> visitors to the LBO website. I think we "insane" people are united in
> our distaste for mushy centrism, as much as we differ on everything
> else.
And that shared impulse is not to your credit and should disturb you. There is an aspect of politics of ego gratification - of being "right" when everyone else is wrong, where the issue matters less than trashing the consensus. This is especially popular with intellectuals and is one reason why a lot of folks distrust intellectuals, since their loyalty to their ideas or allies seems less than the joy in intellectual destruction. Not to trash your personal political journey, but a swing from rightwing Republicanism to leftwing Marxism (or Horowitz's reverse journey) looks awfully suspicious on political grounds but makes sense as a continuity in psychological opposition. Although Doug gets points for also being anti-fashionable as well, since he was as they say, "Rightwing when rightwing wasn't cool" and now is left when that isn't cool particularly (against Horowitz's slightly delayed march with the fashionable neoconservatives.)
The fact is that trashing "mushy centrism" is like trashing gravity. You may not like falling down and you may not like that politics fishes for votes on the 50%-yard line, but it is just there. Bashing it is worse than intellectual self-indulgence- it ignores all the politics railing behind the inevitable mushy centrist rhetoric.
What this thread started on, how to structure the labor movement for maximum mobilization of the membership, is precisely the kind of subterranean politics that matters, that is ignored in too much focus on the day-to-day mush of 50-yard line politics. But the hard fact is that the key to the game is grassroots mobilization that moves the goal posts and the center of political gravity. The rhetoric - especially among Presidential candidates playing hardline at that centrist game - will remain mushy, but the change will be where the center of the mush is located.
The fact remains that every increase in union membership and other grassroots mobilization helps shift that center. No amount of rhetoric from the top will do it.
What bothers me most is that a discussion specifically on exactly the stakes involved in restructuring the AFL-CIO, an issue far more important ultimately to our political future than most issues, was immediately diverted into rhetorical bashing of the Democratic Party.
This is the problem with the impulse to bash mushy centrism. Its so much fun that discussions of the nuts of bolts of organizing get dropped.
--Nathan Newman