There's something to what you say, Nathan. Going to the barricades over the right to hawk plastic schlongs in the Weekly Shopper is the kind of leftish kamikaze strike that has kept the GOP chortling and in office for many years now. The left should of course pick its battles better and focus on dollars-and-cents issues ... or so you would think. The problem is -- as, e.g., Thomas Frank discusses in What's the Matter With Kansas? -- real economic issues are often non-starters with voters at large. Increasingly, any realistic discussion of the economy requires frank acknowledgement of America's class structure and inequitable distribution of wealth. But class is the third rail of US politics that you dare not touch, the red sector that you dare not enter -- the ultimate no-no. Americans' squeamishness about discussing class makes it impossible for the left to make the appeals it should be making and makes it impossible for the country to come to grips with its problems in any realistic way.
Carl
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