[lbo-talk] Poll of Top 5 Public Intellectuals! Vote For Chomsky!

[Carl Remick]

>From: Michael Hirsch <mmh at pipeline.com>
>
>Said as he breathed into a bag: "I want rightists of every
>stripe to feel harried and marginalized.  I have no interest in even
>pretending to give them a hearing.  AFAIC, the US is in a state of civil
>war, and they are the enemy."
>
>Carl: We are not amused. Nobody cares about your interest. We care about 
>stopping the right. Defeating it. And the way to do that is to understand 
>them. Not to sympathize, not to walk a mile in their shoes, but to 
>understand them. If you don't understand the appeal of fascism or 
>corporatism or Xian fundamentalism or individualism or the other isms that 
>compete with Marxism, you're useless to the fight.

Yes, Know Your Enemy is a good idea.  But I'd say the right is a known 
quantity at this point, and the left has nothing left to learn from studying 
it.

Conservatives have no more tricks up their sleeve.  Supply-side economics, 
deregulation, free trade, neoimperialism -- none of right's special effects 
have any special effect on the public anymore.  Batting zero on policy, 
today's right also has a bad charisma crunch:  The Gipper's long dead.  
Maggie T's dotty.  GWB the Idiot King is the global face of conservatism 
today.  In short, the right has nothing to sell and no one to market it:  
Gone are the super salesmen of shit as Shinola, such as Michael Deaver and 
Lee Atwater.

The lingering glow of conservative triumphalism can be ignored, IMO.  It's 
light from an extinct star.

Carl