But personal frustrations aside, things seems to be getting objectively worse in this country and make one wonder where it will all end. So one would like to see some fresh thinking what is to be done. But what you hear is the mindless recitations of the received wisdom and the failure to realize that the people whom the left claims to represent are in fact on the other side of the barricade.
That is not frustrating anymore, but hopeless.
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If this is true (and surely that's debatable) we must conclude that the only way forward is for this civilization to collapse, as others have done before, and, after the even darker ages to follow its failure, for new forms to emerge.
One problem with this is that if you believe collapse to be the only force, so to speak, capable of countering the US' stubbornly considerable power (and halt the advance of the various retrogressive forces within it) this puts you in the unfortunate position of viewing things like mounting gas prices, astounding budget deficits and ecological crisis as perverse positives carrying out a sort of insensate revolutionary project -- a glacier slowly moving, as Bruce Sterling once phrased it, *with sinister majesty* across the surface of our present trouble, crushing everything in its path.
I imagine that philosophically minded Roman slaves, seeing only Rome's power as far as the eye could see and so, no end to their physical and/or existential sufferings for the foreseeable future, nurtured similar thoughts.
Here's one of the major cleavages dividing LBOTALK participants (and no doubt the wider left) into opposing camps: the POV schism between those who feel that the populace can be won over if only we speak to their true concerns (we can call this the 'What's the Matter With Kansas?' approach) and those who think a large percentage of the population, far from being part of our solution are in fact a huge obstacle to progress.
Is it possible for both of these views to be right?
.d.