It's Heating Up

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Oct 25 15:29:26 PDT 2000


LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:


>Nathan's real crime to his electoral critics on LBO is that he lives in the
>political present, not a mythical past, and doesn't pretend that a "real
>political party" of the left is about to burst upon us. Hell, it didn't
>emerge when the left, both organized and mass, was a 100 times stronger than
>it is today.
>
>Defeat for the Democratic national ticket will only produce what the
>Reagan-Bush years did: defensive struggles for our very life. That may not
>matter much to academics and freelance intellectuals, but it matters a
>helluva lot to people who person the trenches of those struggles.

Oh come on. This is such a tired line. Nothing can ever seriously change, because agitating for the real thing will only make things worse. So better vote for Al. And Hillary too, I presume. And public spending (on the good stuff, not jails and bombs) will continue to shrink, incarceration and snooping continue to rise, union density to fall, and political imaginations to shrivel.

The hard-headed-trench-dwellers vs. the academics-and-freelance-intellectuals binary is also tired, and insulting too, especially coming from someone who draws a paycheck from one of the most conservative unions in the country, joined at the hip to the D branch of the status quo.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list