> Have had interesting and rather depressing chats about socialist politics
with my teenage kids, one a 16 year
> old HS junior, another an almost 13-year old middle schooler (now reading
Orwell's 1984) on his own, both
> very smart and fairly politically aware, quite progressive in their
values -- antiwar, anti-imperialist, antiracist, anti-corporate,
> pro-union, feminist. But utterly skeptical about the possibility or point
of socialism -- not that they have a sophisticated
> understanding, though they both have the general idea that it involves the
workers running things. Or that their objections are
> particularly sophisticated or novel. (Generally comes to, A good idea in
theory but it won't work in practice.) But what's
> somewhat dispiriting is the lack of hope for a future that is better than
this.
Is this another way of saying that the smart radicals of yesteryear are more likely to be smart reformers today? If so, I'd say we don't lack hope--we just have different hopes. And sometimes it's just a different vision of how those hopes are to be realized. I think you yourself have cited examples (e.g. Sweden) where reformers have won so convincingly that radical change is and (more importantly) _ought to be_ a tough sell.
-- Luke