Nathan Newman:
> 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.
There's an essential difference between the union and Civil Rights movements and what leftists are trying to do today. Both unionism and Civil Rights were demands for the recognition and performance of liberal principles already acknowledged by the people, including the ruling class. So too feminism, if by feminism one means recognizing women as men with differently- shaped bodies who deserve the same rights to compete and succeed as other men. Anti-war, socialism, anarchism, communism and so forth are not part of liberalism. Therefore, the most likely strategic model for those who adhere to such beliefs is not going to be absorption by liberal institutions but something more profoundly subversive.
-- Gordon