[lbo-talk] Alito & disability

[Bitch | Lab]

At 10:28 PM 1/14/2006, John Lacny wrote:
>Kelly writes:
>
>>OK. But who here relies on the courts anyway? How many
>>people on the left are spending their time this way?
>
>Note that I didn't say "the left." But it is true of many liberals, with 
>whom we have to work. And if it doesn't always have to do with how they 
>spend their time, it does have something to do with how they think, and I 
>think it has an ideologically damaging effect on social movements. Nathan 
>Newman has pointed out that the conventional wisdom is that the civil 
>rights movement began with Brown v. Board. It's ridiculous, but thinking 
>like that makes people less likely to participate in social movements, 
>because they don't understand social movements' importance. All important 
>decisions are really made by the courts or by people like LBJ signing 
>historic pieces of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, so history 
>books get written, stories get told, and CNN specials get made that 
>portray a history where ordinary people have very little agency. I think 
>that this is an important part of hegemony in the US, actually.

I just took a poll of three people: all of them think that the civil rights 
movement started because black people got fed up with Jim Crow. Not 
definitive, but I think it's unlikely that anyone thinks that people in 
power make history and that no one has ever seen pictures of people 
protesting, particularly with the CR movement.

I don't think liberals are in the least bit interested in social movements 
or getting involved with them much at all. So, how it could damage anything 
-- I'm still unclear. For most USers, they buy the line that the SC should 
be "non-political" even they even think much of the SC at all. I don't 
think I read any of the liberal or dem blogs locally that think much about 
using the courts to change anything and would sooner think that they should 
work electorally or through letter writing campaigns, agitating 
politicians, maybe a little protest here or there.

As for Brown, well the NAACP started that strategy many years before and 
they did see it as part of what needed to be done. It was a long hard roe 
to hoe, but they had a strategy and they moved forward with it. And, it 
wasn't as if they didn't work in tandem with other events going on at the time.

What groups with whom we as lefties identify are going that way -- using 
the courts--as a way to achieve social change? REally, I thnk it's just NN 
imaginging that all the world is a bunch of attorneys like him. And using 
it as a trope to hammer on something else. What that is, I'm unclear. I 
have my uncharitable suspicions though.

I suspect that, the typically educated person doesn't think that things 
happened the way you describe.

Bitch | Lab
http://blog.pulpculture.org