The left: still dying (was Re: European Unions)

[Justin Schwartz]

Our own backchat is just a way some of us have of being connected with 
others with similar ideas, trying out ideas, getting some feedback. This 
isn't an activist list--I notice that not one of you responded to my idea 
that we write our Senators about the bad judges now being nominated. 
(Actually, Nathan has set up a reserach group for some of us to get the 
goods on these clowns.) But that is OK, as long as chatting here isn't all 
we do.

I have a different spin on Gary's remark. It's beenobserved that the right 
has sunk a serious and pretty successful effort into gaining--to use a left 
jardon term--ideological hegemony. A generation ago the right was the stupid 
party, cranks at the National Review, the John Birch Society, None Dare Call 
It Treason, that sort of thing. With Olin Professorships, think thanks like 
the Heritage Foundation and the AEI griding out wonkish nuts-and-bolts 
policy ideas, important theirists like James Buchanan and Gary Becker and 
Richard Posner laying an interllectually respectable foundation for right 
wing ideas, the idea that the Right is stupid no longer will wash. Sure, 
they have popularizers, many of whom are pretty dumb, but the smart people 
do imopressive technical work that has given them the intellectual 
self-confidence, the popular prestige, and the policy options necessary to 
rule without embarassment. It's the liberls and the left that seems dumb 
these days.

--jks


>
>on 4/6/01 6:41 PM, Carl Remick at carlremick at hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > point.  Having until recently occupied a perch in the corporate world, I
> > have, one might say, been in the position of an artillery spotter.  And 
>let
> > me tell you, LBOers, *none* of the furious salvos of intensely academic
> > commentary fired off here make the slightest difference to, or are even
> > heard by, the business world.
>
>"The business world" has its own brand of mystifying and obfuscatory talk,
>doesn't it? Not to mention its own perches in academia (in economics
>departments and b-schools, etc.).  If they're supposed to be the measure of
>political effectiveness, it's probably not because they speak the common
>man's lingo on all occasions.  Corporations and the right use different
>languages on different occasions and at different times, just like leftists
>do.  If anything, business jargon, while remaining incomprehensible to a 
>lot
>of people, is associated with power, precisely because it's NOT clear: see
>those commercials with athletes and celebrities like Fergie and Chris 
>Carter
>holding forth on p/e ratios and whatnot.
>
>Gary Ashwill
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com