andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> What are you talking about Carrol? Me, I'm a gloomy
> left liberal.
Just sort of doodling experimentally today, not too successfully. Perhaps an old lawyer's joke carries well enough the core of what I'm aiming at. If the law is against you, emphasize the facts. If the facts are against you, emphasize the law. If both law and facts are against you, emphasize the opposing attorney.
> I rather do suspect, btw, that politics is an
> expression, not a simple one of, personality (itself a
> social product in part but not in whole),
I think seeing "personality" as a product, society and some X as the producers, is misleading.
> in the sense
> that people end up where they do depends on who they
> are and how they see themselves rather than on being
> persuaded of conclusions by reasons. But you agree
> with me on this point, having stated it forcefully
> yourself many times over the years. So why is it a
> fantasy?
The fantasy is in the creation of an archetypal "Leftist" who can then be labelled in abstraction from any empirical or theoretical reality. I've known too many "leftists" (and too many different varieties of leftists from too many different left political tendencies) to believe that such archetypes can have any other real source than the private motives of those using them.
Incidentally, I've come to be suspicious even of self-labelling of this sort. What exactly does it mean for Justin to call himself a "gloomy left liberal"? How many hours of the day, on average, are you gloomy? I didn't realize it until a minute ago as I was typing the preceding paragraph, but I think you would have to search a lot of my posts to find me ever giving myself any label at all. Your opening in this case is probably harmless -- but when someone begins a paragraph with, "I suppose I'm beeing politically incorrect," I expect (and usually am not disappointed in the expectation) some fairly vile bit of racist or homophobia or misogyny to follow. Perhaps parallel to that is when someone begins a post or a pargraph, "Call me a an opportunist, but. . . ." Whether labelling a group or oneself, vaguely evaluative labels raise an unpleasant aroma.
And it is almost a bad play on words to equate a "gloomy" political perspective (whatever that means) with being "personally gloomy" (whatever that means). I happened to talk today to someone who has been thrown into the ranks of the unemployed by a corporate merger. At one point she mentioned that she had to "get out of her funk" (speaking of certain employment-seeking activities she had neglected). But no one would have seen that same person to be personally gloomy in any particular way.
Then there is the old joke of the man who as he fell past the 30th floor of a building remarked, "So far, so good."
> Or maybe you mean something else.
Actually, just sort of doodling experimentally.
>
> Obviously the truth value or appropriateness to the
> historical circumstances of politicalk principles are
> partly -- nmot whilly -- independent of the inner
> being of their advocates. That's true in the sense
> that, for example, national health is a good idea even
> if advocated by a souless bureaucrat for accounting
> reasons.
Yes.
> It's only partly true in the sense that some political
> principles are embodied for prctical purposes in the
> moral being of the advicates: Lincoln's character was
> integral to his vision of the Union,
But was his character relevant at all to the choices of those millions whose activity made that vision real? And of course some of the most important of those millions did not even agree with it: I imagine that most of the blacks who died fighting for the "Union" didn't give a shit about that aspect of Lincoln's vision. (Barbara Fields points out that probably the slaves knew Lincoln was going to free the slaves before he himself did.) And it's a bit difficult to separate that vision from Manifest Destiny, in any case, even if Lincoln did oppose the Mexican War.
> FDR's to the New
> Deal, Reagan's to the Reagan Revolution, and Bush II
> to the current state of affairs.
I think this is approaching tautology: If Roosevelt had not been Roosevelt he would not have been Roosevelt???
But in none of these instances did the validity or invalidity of those principles or practices depend on the validity or invalidity of that "moral being." And whatever Lincoln's moral being was, the millions of those who supported his effort to "save the union" surely represented a huge variety of "innter beings."
> One might also think of King and Malcolm.
To get back to my post, fumbling as it was, explaining the personal grounds of the politics of King and Malcolm doesn't help us explain why some people enjoy applying vague epithets to whole categories of people they have never met and cannot name. I gather Malcolm, like most leftists, was fairly cheerful in his private life.
***
In September of 1970 I got hailed before a legislative committee in Springfield. Early in the proceedings one witness was a local red-hunter (member of the John Birch Society, etc.) from Normal, Illinois, who retailed her various fantasies to the Committee (which was nominally investigating "campus violence"). My friends and I sitting up in the balcony kept dissolving into irrepressible giggles at the various absurdities. She really hadn't seen let alone understood a thing that happened on campus: she was merely filling in the blanks of her fantasy of what a campus radical was like.
But that was only the opening act as it were. The next witness was a professor of Electrical Engineering at the U of I. He was from Germany and had a very attractive German accent. He was apparently moderately conservative in his politics, and seemed willing to be helpful to the Committee, though that was not the Committee's view in calling him to testify.
It seemed that the year before the University had decided that each department in the school should offer _some_ course that could be taken to fulfill distribution requirements. This man had been teachin a course in heuristics to prospective engineers for decades, and now the course was opened up to the general student body for gen ed credit. Clearly he was an excellent teacher, and faced with this new teaching problem (complicated by the fact that what had always been a very small class was now a large one), he came up with an idea. Each student would select his/her own "problem," and in reports at the end of the semester would present to the class the methods worked out to solve that problem. This was 1969-70, and many of the students selected very intriguing problems indeed. Some of the students had not completed the assignment, and this is where the Chairman leaped for the kill: Had those students been unwilling to work on the kind of problem that (the Chairman thought) had been forced on them? The professor's gently delivered reply (I wish I could repeat the accent): "I'm sorry, they were just lazy bums!"
I keep encountering those (not just on this list) whose concept of "leftists" is as stereotyped as was Violet Hamilton's (the Bircher from Normal) or State Senator Horsely's. Such (perhaps unfairly labelled left liberals) would have more to contribute if the stuck to the law or the facts and forgot about the opposing attorneys.
Carrol