The "greener pastures" theory implies that you already have a pasture you can call your own, and then look elsewhere in search of a bigger, more verdant pasture. That is not the case in the USA. The question is where to begin and what to do when you have no pasture at all.
Such socialist organizations as exist in the USA (from the DSA to the Spartacists to anything inbetween), even relatively better ones, do not play any useful role, and Americans would not notice their disappearance if they just all dissolved tomorrow. The very fact that there are so many of them, and that there exists no inter-socialist organization after all these years, proves their irrelevance: they are inferior to religious organizations, which have got around to working on ecumenical and interfaith organizations.
> My sense, though, is that when intellectuals have historically become an
> important part of mass movements, they have usually been sought out by
> organic leaders of these movements whose consciousness has grown
> as a result of their own experience in struggle, rather than the other way
> round. They then nurture each others' understanding and the
> intellectuals frequently move quickly into leadership positions.
> But these have to be real mass
> struggles, not imagined ones by hopeful intellectuals.
We cannot honestly say that intellectuals on the secular left are intellectually superior to those on the religious left. If anything, discussions on Islam, religion, and the Middle East here and elsewhere, demonstrate that secular left intellectuals are woefully more ignorant and prejudiced than religious left intellectuals. (Frankly, some of the recent remarks on the subjects here belong better in the secular and religious right-wing environment than the religious left-wing one.) Given what they are, I'd have to say that it's a good thing that secular left intellectuals have no leadership position anywhere at all in the USA. :-> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>