> http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/10/30/weinstein/index.html
>
> Salon: Maybe I'm not as sanguine as you. I think the "Get out now,"
> ANSWER people wind up getting defined as "the left" -- and the rest of
> us get smeared. When in fact there are really two lefts in this
> country. One is the optimistic one, which believes that its principles
> are in accordance with American democracy, that we're just trying to
> make America live up to its own principles. And the other is a deeply
> negative and pessimistic left, which really does seem to hate this
> country and thinks everything it stands for is wrong, that it's just a
> failed enterprise. That's the ANSWER faction, and it bothers me.
>
> JW [Weinstein]: Well, it's really a holdover from the whole Soviet period.
> But it's fading.
Postmodernism has finally reinvented the late 19th century ideology of linear, irresistible progress, only in a negative sense: the disappearance of the Soviet Union/the welfare state/any and all national restraints on capital is now taken for progress. If only those last few Communists would just die off, then America will once again be America.
-- DRR ("keitai Communist")