> Mailing lists create the impression that the US Left seems to neglect
> domestic issues by focusing excessively on foreign policy issues. This
> would have made sense from a Maoist/Third Worldist perspective. It would
> also make sense if the mass of Americans made political decisions on
global
> issues. Are foreign policy questions the really decisive ones in the US
> politics?
----------------------------
Not usually. Domestic policies count most for those who don't have secure
jobs, college degrees, comfortable incomes, access to travel and the
Internet, savings for retirement and their childrens' education, medical
insurance, and who are forced to live in either rundown and unsafe downtown
neighbourhoods or make the long commute to their jobs from remote suburbs.
They constitute the mass of the population which doesn't frequent left-wing
listserves or support the tiny Green and socialist parties -- what you're
probably referring to as the "US Left". Foreign policy can become a popular
issue, as it is in this election, but, unlike intellectuals, most people
don't make a study of it, and have to see some direct relationship to their
own physical safety or that of their children, or, to a lesser extent, a
conflict between their idea of what the country stands for and the
publicized abuses and atrocities being committed in its name. This also
applies elsewhere outside the US, although you'll invariably find a greater
sensitivity to domestic issues by intellectuals in countries where poverty
is more visibly widespread, and they have less opportunity to escape from
it, including personally, than in the developed capitalist countries.
MG