``American lefts might fulfill Yoshie's call for a new worldview, new or revived idealism, by saturating themselves with the soulful legends of American history....`I'm a abolitionist-suffragette-New Deal-Civil Rights-We the People' American...'' Charles
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Well that's the best suggestion I've read on this thread. Just one addition to this US history talking points. I think it was a spin-off of the abolitionist-suffragette movements that brought us the literarcy movements, public education, library system, and public health, along with laying the backround or roots for the whole social reform movements of the late 19th C that the socialists, communists, and ararchists drew on, along with the early phase of the unions, etc..
Much of this history is mostly suppressed or at least by-passed in US history classes at least at the secondary level, and much of the lower division college requirements. It was the civil rights, feminist, native american, ethnic studies, etc and generally left developments in the 60-70s that attempted to reconstruct this history that brought out the rightwing culture wars in the 80s.
So what we are really talking about is the reconstruction of US progressive history as the foundation of a new left.
Getta get back to work...
CG