> The idea is not that the worse things get the better. It is that we
> have been stripped of so much that the opportunity cost of reclaiming
> what we have lost and obtaining what we should have is negligible.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand this economic jargon -- "opportunity cost," etc. -- so I'm not sure what you are saying. Who is this "we"? The Left? Americans? Human beings in general? I'll pass on commenting on this sentence, unless you want to re-write it in ordinary English.
> Things have been getting worse for quite some time, people simply pay
> more attention when a Bush is at the helm.
"Things"? Again, I'm not sure what you are referring to here. This is the obverse of the recent discussion on whether the U.S. has made fabulous progress in the last couple of generations, which seems to have ended inconclusively. My view is that capitalism is capitalism; it's hard to say whether things are getting "worse" or "better," unless one defines the particular area of discussion pretty precisely and specifies what the criteria of judgment are. In any case, I generally don't make a practice of judging Presidents by whether "things are getting better or worse." That's the sort of thing the superficial journalism school graduates who get jobs in the establishment news media, and couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, chat about. I say: if you think Bush and his associates are total scum-bags who are far below the usual standards of administrations and who have a set of strategies and tactics which are much more destructive to human welfare than the average set of capitalist administrators (which I do), vote for Kerry, because that's the way to get Bush out. Not too complicated. (I guess that may make me a superficial thinker, too, but at least I'm not a journalism school graduate. :-) )
> My posture is no different with respect to Bush, Kerry, or Clinton for
> that matter. Most of the Kerry boosters admit that he is hardly an
> improvement on Bush, but that he *might* provide us with some
> breathing room.
I'm not a "Kerry booster," and neither are the other people on this list who have advocated voting for Kerry. Why do you Nader people keep using such tendentious language?
> I think it is more a matter of liberals/progressives allowing
> themsleves to take down their guard because the perception of
> Democrats as more benign than Republicans is more extravagant than the
> reality.
Again, who on this list has said they would take down their guard? We keep saying precisely the *opposite,* but I'm starting to think that you Nader people are so caught up in your world of delusions and ideology that you don't bother to read what other people say with any care at all. Certainly you don't bother to acknowledge when we complain that you are distorting our positions. One day I would really like to see an intellectually honest Nader supporter; I might learn something from such a person.
> The Kerryistas are fundamentally concerned with the preservation of
> the system and see Bush as a strange anomaly and Kerry as a
> corrective, a path to the status quo ante.
Who are the "Kerryistas" which believe such a thing *who are on this list*? Name names! You're just babbling about straw men/women.
> What I am saying is that we need to think in terms of radically social
> transformation. They way to achieve that is not through fretting about
> the next election. It is about cultivating possibilties for the long
> term, rather than remaining mired in this endless lesser-evilist
> status-quo, spiral.
I repeat what I said before, to which you did not give an answer: I have yet to see in any of your posts any indication of a positive goal toward which your social transformation would lead. All I have seen are (a) conspiracy theories which make interesting fiction but don't seem to have much relation to the real world and (b) recommendations that we support Bush for four more years because that would make the U.S. system even more unworkable. If (b) is not a "the worse the better" position, tell me what you would call it. Perhaps "heightening the contradictions of capitalism"?
Basically, my problem with this heightening-the-contradictions approach is that I think it's very bad politics. Good politics, in my view, involves building movements of people who are looking for a better way of life, not just waiting for the contradictions of capitalism to get so bad that the system somehow eats itself up. Good politics teaches people to dream for what they want and work positively for it. If the system does weaken itself over time, so much the better. But if it does eventually weaken to this extent, you need a mass of people who are educated to what is possible and are ready with a program to replace the system with a better one. Sniffing around for conspiracies everywhere and waiting passively for capitalism to wreck itself is just not providing the needed education.
As has been often pointed out, the drawback to a conspiracy-theory approach to politics (besides the fact that most of these theories turn out to be baseless) is that its foundation is an essentially reformist position: once we've uncovered all the conspiracists and locked them up (or whatever we do with them), the system can work properly. For example, suppose Bush & Co. did blow up the WTC and hit their own Pentagon with a missile. Obviously, they should be put in jail, and a nice new administration should replace them. For example, Kerry's, which is presumably full of high-minded individuals who would never do such dastardly deeds. Or maybe they would -- so we have to wait for them to do said deeds, whereupon we clever sleuths can uncover them and incarcerate the perps. Again, a political strategy, if you can call it that, which leaves the majority of people passive and basically uneducated about their true power. Folks just have to wait for the smart guys to detect the next conspiracy. In sum, conspiracy theories + "heightening the contradictions" = passive, disempowering politics.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.