> [Hair continues to sprout, unbecomingly, on leftist chests. From NY
> Observer, "Left Falls Apart as Center Holds":]
That's not hair. Them's brain cells.
It's not that the Left can't tell the difference between Kosovo and Ground Zero. It's the lack of a utopian project, strong unions, and sane electoral systems -- the subsurface networks which *really* change society, as opposed to the manifestos and demos which merely narrate that change. For decades, the US was the global metropole, so the only oppositional politics was "No", the rejection of US consumerism. This usually fed back into an understandable sectarianism -- the mirror image of US hyperindividualism, really.
The fallout of S11 is that, for the first time in three decades, the economic has taken a back seat to the political, or more precisely, to the geopolitical. The magic of the marketplace has failed to deliver a more peaceful or fairer world, and now the hour of collective action has struck -- a tremendous opportunity for the Left.
-- Dennis