De Long belongs ...

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Oct 2 09:23:20 PDT 2001


Carl Remick wrote:


>>Brad said he signed off because all the hard lefties here were making
>>him feel like a right-winger, and he didn't like that. No doubt many
>>will respond by saying he is a right-winger, but that's a pretty
>>weird political taxonomy that makes little distinction between him
>>and Jerry Falwell or Amity Shlaes.
>>
>>Doug
>
>Well, that's the wonder of Darwinian thinking, innit? Being able to
>recognize the fundamental similarity of different beings despite
>superficial differences ;-)

I know you're making a joke, but BdL is a right-wing social democrat. He believes in public programs and income redistribution, and no doubt opposes posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Falwell and Shlaes would probably disagree.

Here's an excerpt from my interview with Slavoj Zizek, to appear in the next issue of Punk Planet.


>At the same time this movement was growing, there was a string of
>electoral victories for the right - Berlusconi in Italy, Haider in
>Austria, our own Bush. What do you make of these?
> They're not to be underestimated. I'll put it in my old-fashioned
>Stalinist terms: there are two deviations to be avoided here,
>left-wing and right. The right wing deviation is to fully endorse
>their liberal opponents, to say, ok we have our problems with Gore
>or Blair but they're basically our guys, and we should support them
>against the true right. We should also avoid the opposite mistake,
>which is that they're all the same, it doesn't really matter if it's
>Gore or Bush. From this position it's only one step to the position
>which says so it's even better we have Bush, because then we see the
>true enemy. We should steer the right middle course: while
>maintaining our critical distance towards the moderate left, one
>shouldn't be afraid when certain issues are at stake, to support
>them. What is at stake is the following: it looked in the 1990s that
>after the disintegration of the socialist way, the Third Way left
>represents the universal interests of capital as such (to put it in
>the old Marxist way), and the right parties represent only
>particular interests. In the U.S., the Republicans target certain
>types of rich people, and even certain parts of the lower classes
>(flirting with the Moral Majority, for example).



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