On Oct 19, 2006, at 2:07 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
> Ww're caught within a system -- you, too, Doug.
Well yeah, of course. There's no outside ideology either.
Apropos all this, I was struck by this sentence in Michael Kazin's excellent book, The Populist Persuasion. "While the 1938 slogan 'Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism' did not survive the decade, its spirit lived on as the quixotic fantasy of activists who craved acceptance from the same society they wanted to revolutionize." Presumably if you're a radical or revolutionary or something else along that spectrum, you believe there's something wrong with the way most people think and live - but you can't easily say that, can you? So we get awkward constructions like "blaming the victim" when people don't feel victimized, or refusing to "disparage working class aspirations" even if you think those aspirations are troubling (and you wouldn't want to live that way yourself), or saying that elites are corrupt and the masses are full of virtue even though you long to deliver the masses from their lot, etc. etc.
Doug