> You mean that we should remain silent and passive in the corner by
> ourselves until a savior drops from the sky with a tongue of honey?
How you could possible get this stuff about a "savior with a tongue of honey" from what I wrote mystifies me -- or rather, it would mystify me if I were not familiar with your habit of reading every post with your own preoccupations foremost in your mind, rather than what the poster actually wrote.
> And do you really fantasize that the media will give any publicity to
> _any_ left spokesperson?
Of course, they would, and they have. To get media publicity, however, in this day and age, you have to be interesting and even entertaining, so that a large number of people will be interested in tuning you in. The media are interested in large audiences; if someone came along who could read Das Kapital and make it entertaining, they could probably get a show. OTOH, the left tends to specialize in dour, boring speech-makers, who tell their audiences that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and the only way to stop this process is to take a whole quart of cod liver oil, straight. No wonder they can't get anyone to listen.
> We have to _create_ the audience before the audience will listen to us.
And how do you think that audience will be created? The left at this point, as I said, consists of small groups sitting in a corner talking to themselves, and lots of people love this situation. Big frogs in small ponds, after all. And it is in many ways more comfortable to huddle with a group who thinks like you than to face the big world with all sorts of people with "bad ideas" in it.
To break out of this situation, one would have to take previous successful movements as a model, e.g., the civil rights movement. Like that movement, one would need to rely on existing social networks, such as the black churches it built on, and one would need leaders like King who already had some credibility in those networks and the ability to speak meaningfully to them. Unfortunately (I say as a strong secularist myself), many of them, like King, would have to speak in religious terms. Thinking that one could build a broad movement of Americans on purely secular foundations is just unrealistic, I think.
These small, purist leftist groups attract their members primarily by the principles they espouse, and thus they attract people who are motivated by pure principles -- socialist, environmentalist, feminist, etc. But to build a movement broader than that, you have to bring in people who don't act on principles, but by following leaders they have a personal attraction to. My point is that people like Nader are walking abstract principles, not people most Americans would be attracted to. Do I think that the left could find the latter people? Sure, if they would trust them to take leadership positions, instead of worshipping the currently fashionable principle of "leaderless organization."
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