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I agree. I've been telling myself the same thing for years.
Three years ago, I was arguing for Gore and basically presumed the gradualist agenda, against Yoshie and Carrol who were taking something like the Leninist line that Kelley quoted. Meanwhile, Doug and others were following another gradualist route, making room for third party alternatives.
I used to think that advocating, supporting, and pursuing the lesser evil within limits, making certain compromises on various issues and agendas was how political progress was supposed to be made. Hold out for the ideal position then give into realism---or a few rat hairs to the left. I even did some of this in a small way in local scenes long ago.
Meanwhile all forms of progressive gradualism have seemed to work in the opposite direction, sliding back several steps for every one step gained. Or if succeeding, these successes awaited a complete transformative reversal into absurdity later on. And, always under the presumption that the other side was more or less playing by the same rules, compromising here and there, holding to various principles, and so forth and so on.
However, it now seems to me, that we are playing metaphorical Palestinian to an intractable Israel. They creat facts on the ground, we compromise for less pain. More facts, more compromise over and over. It is as if the political space of a US progressive reform tradition or gradualism has become something like the Palestinian territory, sliced and diced into a string of isolated archipelagos, interstitial spaces criss-crossed with roadways, barriers, check points, nomanslands, free fire zones, and fortified settlements---an ever narrowing space of oppression, zero future and absolutely no contiguity or promise, except in the imagination. All the while, its life is bled out slowly in front of us.
What am I saying? I am not joining the suicide squads just yet. I don't subscribe to the Leninist trajectory of driving internal contradictions of class within an imperial war into civil war and then into revolution. Obviously I don't think we are any where near that and probably never will be. On the other hand I am beginning to recognize the concrete feeling behind this kind of thinking. Understanding this trajectory as an abstract potential or some theoretical tactic is a different experience than feeling it. Even so, it sounds ridiculous to talk this way.
And yet Bush and the Right are so arrogant, so polarizing, so careless in their exploitation of every division, so blatant in their service to the rich, and so universally hated outside their own thin middle american support, that they almost beg history for an imperialistic, war mongering end.
When was the last time an English grandmother climbed the Gates of Buckingham Palace to hang the US flag upside down?
Well, never mind. I'll just go back to my George Bush Dead Pool count down. What's today's total? Two.
Jenny Brown writes: ``Make'em steal this next one too, I say. Why hand it to `em?''
Well as you can see, in California the Right just buys a new governor, if they don't like the old one.
But speaking of Florida. Guess who Governor Arnold just appointed his Director of Finance? Florida's former state budget director, Donna Arduin, Queen of Pain. She looks like one of Cruella's step-sisters.
First tax cut, the DMV fee increase aimed mostly at new SUVs. Add another 4 billion to the deficit (soon to come out of some program for the poor).
Next item, chop Workers' Compensation, naturally.
Workers' Comp has been a target of the business lobbies for years. It could also include erasing those egregious humanitarian abuses of the Labor Standards Enforcement division---all in the name of boosting the economy by making California more friendly to business. Do I hear the humming of sentinels in the background?
The Terminator says, ``Give me your huddled masses, your working poor, your sick, and your injured and I will crush them like bugs.''