----- Original Message ----- From: "joanna bujes" <joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com>
> I don't agree. From what I remember, Reagan projected/expressed an
> avuncular air meant to reassure: "There, there," he seemed to be saying,
> "you can all just go to sleep now. We'll take care of everything. There
are
> simple answers and we have them. Just relax and go to slelep." And, people
> did.
>
> One thing the right understands is people's profound need for emotional
> grounding and connections...in an alienated and completely dispossessing,
> soul-murdering culture. So the right identifies itself with images that
> concretly express that need and its satisfaction through the family, the
> church, the "community" -- completely ignoring the extent to which these
> formations are systematically being destroyed by capitalism. According to
> the right, we're not defending a nation; we're defending "our home land,"
> the poor are not those who lack food and housing, they are "home"-less.
The
> left, large parts of which think of the family as an atavistic form and
> who, through their wholesale adherence to identity politics, cannot rise
> above the level of the individual have nothing with which to counter
> right-wing propaganda.
>
> Joanna
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How to lift the taboo on class and other categories? A taboo imposed on leftists in the same way talking about drugs is taboo or raising the issue of atheism is taboo.
Ian