>Like I said in a post yesterday (which no one seemed to read -- sigh ...),
You mean your posts on "Summary of Nader analysis" & "Beyond the Summary of Nader analysis." I've read them now -- thought-provoking posts really. No response from LBO-talkers simply means that they got buried under the deluge of posts on Nader's "guilt," Florida recounts, Trotskyist votes in Volusian County (!), sorrows of Jewish retirees who mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan (!), etc.; I missed your posts when they were first posted also. It's amazing how this presidential election has made one hundred flowers bloom.... :)
>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.
Chuck Grimes has been making the same argument as yours for a while (his has been a lonely voice, though). I don't know if four more years of liberal internationalism will enlighten many more, however, without an aggressive program of political education & agitation. One hope is that, with four more years, more folks may come to see an effect that liberal internationalism has had on Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, East Timor, the Central African region, etc.; but I won't bet on it, for facts do not speak for themselves.
>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).
You are probably right, and for this reason I think that leftists should lay off on gun control at the very least. Gun lovers are not necessarily conservative in other ways, so I believe that making a strong statement against gun control might help realign social forces a bit. This may be wishful thinking on my part, though.
Yoshie