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<p>One of the best things I've read lately, at</p>
<p><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fitch111006p.html">http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fitch111006p.html</a><br>
</p>
<p>My favorite bits:<br>
<br>
</p>
<p>"Ideology" can be understood as the distortion of social reality caused
by social perspective. The prism of ideology explains why pro-business and
pro-labor economists can never agree on such basic questions as whether raising
the minimum wage helps or hurts low-wage workers or whether mass immigration
increases or decreases the number of jobs for natives or whether cutting taxes
produces more or less revenue.</p>
<p>Third Way centrists think that tacking back and forth between left and
right immunizes them from ideology. They confuse history's direction with
their own tropism for office, history's locomotive with the gravy train.
Just because partisan advantage can be found in the middle doesn't mean that's
where truth or wisdom or justice necessarily lies. However much they insist
on a values-first approach, the values of centrism are mostly situational.
Stalin -- who could argue equally well for the Popular Front against Hitler,
for the Hitler-Soviet pact, and then for the Great Patriotic War against
Nazism -- was a centrist.</p>
<p>Civic republicanism, the new vision for the new Democrats, is egregiously
ideological in just this centrist sense. It's neither republican nor civic
nor even particularly Democratic. The civic republicans' notion of the common
good resembles Herbert Hoover's concept of "public interest" much more than
the Roosevelt-Truman emphasis on the interests of "the little guy." And
for all its emphasis on the need to put values first, it's essentially amoral.
In Sartrian terms, it's less of a philosophy than ideological exercise in
bad faith......<br>
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<p>.........<br>
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<p>Generally speaking, bad faith means a willful blindness to the defining
aspects of a situation. Selective vision enables the actor to avoid choice.
Having it both ways confers a material advantage, which the actor ignores,
assuming a dubious moral posture.</p>
<p>In the civic republican version of bad faith, the gradual abandonment
of liberal commitments to the disfavored is transformed into the virtue of
gradualism. The simple reality that a harsh struggle is going on between
haves and have-nots is transmuted into the notion that we're all in one boat
-- or community. And a rising tide lifts them all. But as recently as 2004,
Paul Krugman observes, the U.S. economy grew at a strong 4.2 percent. Yet
the real median family income -- the purchasing power of the typical family
-- actually fell. Meanwhile, he notes, poverty increased, as did the number
of Americans without health insurance.<a
href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fitch111006p.html#_edn19"
name="_ednref19" class="style6"><sup>19</sup></a> The conviction that the
low-end boats will somehow levitate themselves despite the trends that have
persisted for a generation is rebranded as Tomasky's virtue of "optimism."</p>
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