You are right, M.B - many of the dim bulbs on LBO will never be able to think their way out of the conventions your western left has boxed itself up in. Rather in the shape of a pinewood box, I'm afraid.
Just for example, anybody who buys the argument that the Democrats are "more liberal" (whatever that means - in fact the DLC and not liberalism is now hegemonic in that party, isn't that obvious?) than it was in the 1950's is a delusion of those who have been too long admiring their own leftist reflection in the Democratic mirror, mistaking themselves for a more "liberal" party as a whole.
Never mind, of course, that the whole notion of the Dems or Repubs as "mass parties" is absurd, confounding a single Election Day act with a "mass base". One might even call this "electorial cretinism". Of the two, only the Repubs have a relation to anything resembling a true organized mass base in the Christian fundies and their allies. The Democrats do not: the AFL-CIO bosses can no longer consistently command their own shrunken membership, as we saw when about a third of those members (who bothered to vote) in California voted for Schwarznegger, a guy whose single cachet has been that he is - precisely and nothing more - "anti-socialist" in ideology and anti-worker in practice. Otherwise, consistent supporters of the Democrats are an atomized, unorganized mass of the more civilized American petit bourgeoisie who can only project their own subjective liberal to left fantasies onto a "Democratic Party" of their dreams.
The reality is that these two organizations only constitute political parties to the extent that they organize different sections of the American ruling class, inside and outside the state institutions. With the partial exception of the Repubs' loose and opportunistic connection with the organized Christian fundies (themselves barred from acting fully independently as a faction due to the limitations of their formally religious organization), these differing sections of the ruling class constitute the _only_ actual "party factions" of the political regime outside the marginalized "third parties", themselves often compromised and coopted, as we've seen with the Greens. The politicians themselves are all capitalist entrepreneurs, are compelled to function as political "entrepreneurs", and the capitalist class in its various sections thereby constitute the real substance of party in the US political regime.
The rest are but iron filings drawn to opposite poles of the same magnet.
The magnet and both its poles have moved considerably to the right since the 1960's, and while the magnet itself has stretched a bit - perhaps a hallucinagenic effect of the ever more frantic embrace of one of the poles from the left - but in class terms that is certainly a difference without distinction for _us_.
-Brad Mayer
Michael Dawson wrote:
>I say it again: Yoshie fancies herself our enlightener. She
>actively seeks out topics on which she can advertise her own
>radicalism. She presumes that we think "Afghan lesbian" is some
>unimaginable contradiction, that we all have our "Western" heads up
>our "Western" butts.
>
>Yoshie is a didact, and thinks that's radical.
What makes you so obsessed with speculating about me and my opinion? Why do you assume that an essay by an Afghan lesbian has anything to do with you, when I posted the same essay to the two other listservs to which you are not subscribed and the posting said nothing about you? -- Yoshie