Rights are pretty elastic, for good or for ill. There is a 20-year campaign against U.S. "entitlement" programs because they confer rights to consumption, and a more general campaign against a purported proliferation of rights that have partially enfranchised minorities and others. Most real left organizing on the ground pertains to rights (the living wage, sweatshops, WTO, right to employment, welfare rights). Even the automatic anti-imperialists were saying the U.S. had no *right* to be in ghe Balkans. Right?
I'd say we need more rights. Of the right kind, of course.
mbs
> rc-am wrote:
> >that's my particular context at the moment. as for the discussion on the
> >US constitution, i wonder why the US left has never argued for the
> >abolition of the bill of rights.
>
> Quite the contrary - except for a few oddballs like my friend Dan
> Lazare, the Bill of Rights is a sacred text to most American
> leftists. Dan argues, among other things, that the BoR and the rest
> of the U.S. constitutional structure has effectively demobilized
> popular struggle: between the guarantee of "rights" bestowed by The
> Founders and the obstacles to any troublemaking guaranteed by the
> machinery of governance (the Senate, the mutually limiting three
> branches of federal government, the whole structure of federalism and
> localism), the status quo is given enormous powers to reproduce
> itself. But it's never seen as such; most liberals, and even
> gun-worshipping neo-libertarians like Alexander Cockburn, see the BoR
> as the only bulwark against oppressive, centralizing state power.
>
> Doug
>
>