As you probably know, there have been left-wing & right-wing interpretations of Machiavelli, and I'm going with the former. Think of Gramsci's comments on the Modern Prince in _Prison Notebooks_, Althusser's _Machiavelli & Us_, etc.
>I don't find it difficult at all to imagine a not-too-distant
>future where (eg) Charles and Yoshie's happiness might be more threatened
>by the wages of the very sort of ambivalence towards free speech they
>exhibit than by racial ascriptions.
1. No one -- not evern Bill Lear, Justin, etc. -- is committed to free speech all the time, at any cost. There already exist many legal qualifications, some of which are good and others bad. How much freedom of any kind we may enjoy is determined by the balance of social powers, and laws and unspoken rules are its expressions, which in turn affects the terrain of politics.
2. As long as racism exists, anti-racists' freedoms -- including freedom of speech -- are always more circumscribed than racists'.
3. What is perhaps more important than legal boundaries of speech is the politics of everyday life, especially what is or is not allowed among leftists, as far as the quality of left politics is concerned, which is actually foremost on my mind.
>They prevailed (to a meaningful degree, anyway) in a sea of racist
>and sexist discourse, not only because the time was right, but because THEY
>were right.
Rob, my friend, I wish you were right, and I'll be so happy to be proven wrong. It will be so comforting to imagine that truth will prevail in the end, no matter what, but my school of historical materialism is not predicated upon the Hegelian sort of teleology and cunning of reason. Besides, empirically, anti-racists have _yet_ to win; think of racial profiling in policing, income & wealth disparity between races in America & elsewhere, capitalism & imperialism that leave the majority of people of color in the world impoverished, and so on.
Yoshie