[lbo-talk] Re: poor, white and pisssed

[Turbulo at aol.com]

I'm basically sympathetic to much of this article. It suffers, however, from a basic defect of current political discourse: the obliteration of any distinction between liberal and radical or revolutionary (the latter two seeming to have disappeared from the political charts).

In my long-distant political heyday, a liberal in the American sense (not as in neoliberal) meant someone who favored a more humane class system, but was basically committed to the existing order, and therefore limited in the extent to which s/he would go in mobilizing the workers and the poor to fight in their own name. But it just doesn't seem to occur to the author, as it doesn't to, say, Tom Frank, either, that it may not not be just a question of lack of communication between liberals and workers, or explaining working-class reality to liberals. It may also be the case that their ideology, while less hostile than that of the Republican right, represents a class interest different from and in the end opposed to that of workers.