Nathan says:
> >No, what Doug is highlighting is that many leftists are happy to ally with
> >the extreme Right in bashing the government over civil liberties, but won't
> >attempt to make less narrow appeals on the war to bring wavering liberals
> >to an antiwar position.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Are "wavering liberals" wavering on the war or civil liberties or both?
In regard to this, I'm mystified as to what the anti-war Left is supposed to do with wavering liberals, or wavering conservatives for that matter, other than the obvious task of trying to find some kind of common ground to base their activism on. You can't find common ground by going off your own ground. In the present case, I think most Americans are going to be firmly pro-war until they get bored with the war, or something very bad happens as an obvious result of it, so if you're looking for a near-term mass movement against the war, you're probably looking in vain. The sad fact is, the values of liberalism, so deeply held by Americans, lead and will continue to lead to imperial wars just as they have done for the last two or three hundred years, while liberals studiously ignore the connection between their political philosophy and its results. There's not much that can be done about this until the liberal political philosophy has been pretty seriously subverted, and that can't be done overnight.
In the long term, my anarchistic view is that you have to build a new society within the shell of the old, so that means very specifically preaching to the choir and getting them to do some singing as well as enlarging the choir and getting them a bigger audience.
-- Gordon