<snip, snip, snip, all of which is a fantastic diagnosis>
>For the Clinton years, after all, have been good for the Black & Feminist
>& GLBT Talented Tenth: good jobs; safer & cleaner cities; important
>cabinet appointments; reproductive rights & affirmative action for
>the Talented Tenth; humanitarian interventions in Haiti & Yugoslavia
>to their liberal hearts' content; etc.
Wow, Yoshie, almost exactly how I would diagnose it, although not with the erudition or acumen which you supply !!! Do you ever sleep ? (Or maybe you're not TA'ing this term).
Like I said in a post yesterday (which no one seemed to read -- sigh ...), the reason I want Gore to win, is b/c after 8 years folks like yourself finally have a real profound grip on human rights interventionism and global neo-liberalism (with a labor and environment side agreement attached) abroad, Talented Tenth economic and civil rights gains at home -- and a clear sense of how the role of third party politics is to educate/agitate about these pernicious links, while pushing meager reforms and resisting rightward back-slipping. If Bush wins, then it's back to defending "political correctness" from a liberal point of view instead of taking it on from a radical point of view, and so on. The Dem model of governance and hegemony is the wave of the future, best to not have a temporary interruption so we can get around to critiquing and attacking it.
Another thing that you don't point out, but which I think is worth pointing out -- people of color/feminist reliance on the repressive apparatus of the state to police and punish racist and misogynist attacks only inflames the sentiment of culturally conservative white folks that gub'mint is a tool of the multicultis and feminazis. Perhaps an irresolvable tension, but some of other form of combatting racism and misogyny would be more propitious if the left has any interest in trying to bring folks who might have been prairie populists 100 years ago (not that populism wasn't infused with and destroyed by racism, as you point out).
John Gulick