JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>
>
> You know what the essential fantasy in all this is? That the Bush gang'll
> give up power if voted out. There's going to be a pitched battle and 'which
> side are you on?' is not going to be at all rhetorical. Well, there'll be a
> pitched battle if we do our jobs.
I very very seldom disagree with Jenny, who seems to be one of the shrewder political analysts on the list, and who also knows a lot about the nature of organizing political action.
But I just don't believe this. The Florida election in 2000 was no more stolen than were the Texas and Illinois elections in 1960. Conditions in the u.s. now are not even close to the kind of conditions that either allow or (from a ruling class perspective) would justify the kind of transfer of power Jenny envisages.
We do have a serious civil rights situation in this country, but the war and the anti-war movement it inspired have created the nucleus for a mass movement which can (and in places already is) broaden from one demanding an end to the occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan to one demanding the roll back of the two congressional acts undergirding the attack on civil rights, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Patriot Act. Worry about what the Bushies specifically are doing obscures both what has been happening for 10 years _and_ interferes with the serious business of building an opposition.
Carrol