JCWisc at aol.com wrote:
>
> And isn't this what all 19th century European democrats and radicals thought?
> Some may have had their doubts about America, but Tsarist Russia was
> indubitably the very citadel of backwardness and blackest reaction.
> Everybody knows that. Where's the great contrarian insight here?
I made my own major discovery about a core feature of "bourgeois" culture several years before I found myself involved in radical politics. I was writing a doctoral dissertaion on critical treatment of Alexander Pope in the early 20th century, and I was reading all these half-pint critics who, repeating cliches about Pope over a century old were still somehow presenting themselves as contrarian. Read through the archives on this list and see how often the poster will repeat some really banal (and quite popular) opinion and pass it off as being a minority and independent position. (Most statements about "The Left" fall into this category.)
Carrol