Tom Walker wrote:
>
> A lot of what people on the left view as horribly
> reactionary stuff -- family values, faith-based social programs --
> represents a very understandable longing for an imagined more
> compassionate past while at the same time pursuing that nostalgia on the
> charlatan terms of the biggest payoff for the least effort.
I've argued for something like this, usually under one of two headings.
1) Throughout human history (and for that matter pre-human hominid history) "trusting the leader" has made sense. To some extent this was still partially true in (some) pre-capitalist class societies. Hesiod was probably more accurate about the 'aristocracy' of his day than was the "Homer" (the Odyssey-poet), but still the episode in which Odysseus' men kill the cattle of the sun was not _wholly_ a bit of aristocratic ideology.
2) In an atomized social order it makes rough-and-ready sense for people to "go-along" with whatever groupings they can find to give some order or sense to their lives.
Instead of complaining, leftists have to do the best they can as we go along to create alternatives that can grow in times of crisis.
Carrol
P.S. Somewhere recently -- one one of these lists? -- I saw reference to the inability of u.s. troops in europe to defeat the germans except through overwhelming numerical superiority. Whenever they were in equal numbers, the Germans beat them. If so, the Road to Hell has deep origins.
Carrol