> OK, first off, let me make it clear that as far as I can recall, I
> have never used the phrase "anybody but Bush" or its annoying acronym.
> It strikes me as something invented by Bush's defenders as a way to
> imply that his opponents are irrational.
I think it was in fact invented by the ABB Club itself, but in a somewhat ironic, self-mocking way. In other words, nothing to take all that seriously. But when it comes to the subject of the 2004 Presidential election, a lot of people want to take themselves very seriously indeed. This must be declared an Irony-Free Zone! they insist.
> As for myself, I prefer the formulation "defeat reaction," which in
> this concrete case means "defeat Bush" -- not an abstract call for all
> times and places, but an assessment of the real-life political choice
> facing us all, which we get wrong at our peril. Carrol accuses me of
> confusing "the handling of contradictions among the people" with "the
> handling of contradictions between ourselves and the enemy," and I'm
> willing to engage in some self-criticism here . . . if he's right,
> though I don't think he is.
Personally, I find myself more and more wanting to get away from these martial metaphors for politics. Seeing politics as a kind of war is much too simplifying and distorting. Wars are fought between organized armies, using specific weapons engineered for the purpose of killing, maiming, and causing destruction among "the other guys," the enemy, over a specific, mappable terrain. I think politics is much more "environmental," a very complex interaction among multiple species in a constantly shifting, evolving situation.
> because his conception of "the Democratic Party" is about as
> meaningless as the nebulous references to "the left" that he so often
> (correctly) criticizes.
Whenever I see someone refer to the DP as though it were a solid, monolithic entity -- "the DP does this" or "the DP prevents us from doing that" -- I know I am in the presence of someone who either doesn't understand how American politics actually works or is deliberately suppressing their knowledge in order to make some polemical point. (There it is, the "war" metaphor again.)
> Given this, isn't my time better spent trying to win over and convince
> the confused and the waverers among the vast majority of people? What
> reason is there to seek unity with the tiny ranks of the
> left-adventurists, when they clearly have no genuine interest in
> people's real-life concerns to begin with? As is stands right now,
> their contributions to building a movement amount to a net loss.
I agree, except that I wouldn't be quite so hard on them as to say that they have no genuine interest in the real-life concerns of people. I think they are (usually) sincerely interested in solving problems of poverty, racism, war, and so on; it's just that their way of approaching these problems is much too over-simplified and warped by their imprisonment in the war metaphor.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax