> In the United States, as in other places within the
> neo-liberal universe, appeals to aid the poor have
> travelled full circle from the gains made during the
> Great Depression -- in which a wider (though far from
> complete) acceptance grew of the notion that a modern,
> civilized nation should not allow millions of its
> citizens to simply fall into destitution without
> collective intervention to prevent it -- to an earlier
> model of unreflective, alternating pity and fear:
> tender scenes of wide eyed children in filthy rags,
> fear of the terrible consequences of not providing
> some amount of help (visions of hordes of poor
> descending on peaceful burbs) and related imagery.
I am already overposting, but hey, Doug's away so I hope to get away with it:).
I am a bit surprised why you mention the evil of neo-liberal policies and the criminal failure to provide public services in this country. You did not think that I would support such policies, did you?
The point that I am consistently, I hope, arguing is that we need a new justification of public services as an alternative to the neo-liberal market ideology - which is quite attractive on it surface to many. The left has little to counter that attractiveness - just the old mantra of "more social spending" and appeals to pity. Perhaps such Charles-Dickens-like stories may have some short-term popular appeal, but I do nothing they offer grounds for public policy.
What I hear from the left, not just this list, but The Nation and progressive organizations, is not a coherent vision for the future of the commonwealth - as you aptly term it - but a series of grievances - some of them justified more than the other - against the vision of the right. That is definition of reactionary in my book - reacting to moves of others without proposing anything new. And when on the top of this I hear someone suggesting that, say, gang violence is a right thing to do, or that left should defend the rights of the entertainment industry to freely distribute its poisonous products or some other "principled" but ridiculous to the common sense proposition - this tells me that the left really run out of ideas. It is like the Saturday Night Live - it started great, but in the 1990 it became so pathetic that one wanted to cry rather than laugh when forced to watch it.
As I said time and again, one of my goals is to make people re-think their position and develop a coherent left wing philosophy that would offer an attractive alternative to the neo-liberal mantra (George Lakoff had some great ideals in that respect). That is why I am trying to challenge the positions that I see as taken for granted in these circles, yet flat dead with the rest of the population. If you think it sounds snotty, sorry, but mindless populism of the New Deal and Progressive eras is one of those things that I think gotta go - and for a simple reason, the left will never out-populist the right.
So to be on a more positive side, what I would like to see is less bitching about Bush, corporate criminals, cops beating up hoodlums, the dire straits of the entertainment industry and the plight of various freaks, less escapism into utopia - and more about plan how to organize a just society, and how to run a complex economy without a race to the bottom. Like central planning - only better.
Wojtek