>But once an opinion is a majority, it is already history. In that sense,
the
>US response to 9-11 is already history.
>The future, however, belongs to minority opinions. That is the left's
>destiny: to create the future but never get any acknowledgement for it,
even
>from self-denying, free lance leftists like yourself.
I'm so glad the union and civil rights movements didn't have this kind of arrogance and instead recognized they had to figure out how to build majorities for their goals out of the real existing majorities that existed at any point in time.
It is a bizarre disease of certain contemporary leftists that they operate as an embattled minority; once upon a time the left believed that they were the majority, the vast majority, facing off against a small elite holding power undemocratically.
There is a bad vein of populism that bows to the worst prejudices of the majority in upholding "the peoples will" but there is an honorable alternative majoritarianism, a semi-Rousseaian view that out of the mess of individual prejudices lies a more progressive general will that can command a majority. THat is not a majority in the future, but a majority now if properly appealed to.
But the self-defeating and solipsistic satisfaction in being a virtuous "saved" minority, essentially a poltical counterpoint to the Jehovah's Witnesses, is just pretty useless.
-- Nathan Newman