BTW I asserted before, but in the midst of a long rambling thing- smalltown country southern folk are, demographically, not the central question for future US. Suburban US people are. They happen to be the furthest from our lefts' horizon. This portends our transition from niche to extinction.
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What's wrong with this assertion?
That's the question I asked myself as I read. I knew - or felt - that it wasn't quite right, that something was missing but I couldn't quite name it.
Chuck and Carrol helped to sharpen my thinking here: Chuck, when he mentioned "workerist" fixations and Carrol when he pointed out that the entire concept of "the left" allying itself with this or that group or focusing on this or that topic is empty because there isn't a central committee which can reach consensus and sign treaties nor a captain of a USS Left to order a course, heading and speed change towards some ideal goal.
So again, what is wrong with what you're saying?
I think it's your insistence upon two, unproven notions: 1.) that the left is marginalized *because* of its geographical distribution (huddled, you'd have us believe, in the Baudrillardian 'unreal' places of the US coasts) and 2.) that 'life-stylists', naifs and assorted un-serious people have hijacked most left spaces and orgs, stealing desperately needed time and resources away from union organizers and other reportedly grounded, hard boiled types.
What you're stubbornly ignoring is the fact that the marginalization of "the left" and leftish ideas didn't follow a moment of fair comparison in which 'ordinary people fairly viewed their options and decided upon neoliberalism, unprovoked war and all the rest of it. There were no Lincoln Douglas debates in which 'our' side got a chance under bright lights to present ideas and make proposals.
What there is, in fact, is an information environment in which even a middlebrow, mainstream Dem like John Kerry can be described as "far left", in which 'socialized medicine' is routinely used as a scare term, in which a failure to begin even the most tepid criticism of US foreign policy with a sentence like "we need to return to the high ideals and principles of the past..." is seen as outrageous and radical.
The left, such as it is, did not marginalize *itself* because of an excessive fondness for yoga, big city living, pointy headed books and other things 'ordinary people' supposedly don't dig (and what a bizarre way of seeing things: ordinary against, well, not ordinary - as if some humans are legit, just because, and others less so and we can decide who's who using some subjective system of 'realness measurement...or zip code).
The left was marginalized by the aggressively directed actions of its powerful adversaries to narrow the boundaries of acceptable discourse to as confined a space as possible.
You talk as if there hasn't been a quite successful, multi-decade propaganda war waged against left leaning ideas, as if a man like Chomsky is routinely booked on "The Tonight Show", as if the NY Times accurately reported all the relevant facts during the lead in to the invasion of Iraq.
As Zizek (I hesitate to mention the name, since doing so might be used against me as evidence of disconnectedness from...something) stated at one point in the Astra Taylor film, "many people find it easier to imagine the end of the world from an asteroid or global warming than the end of capitalism."
This is no accident. It is the result of our opponents' hard work to TINA our asses unto death.
.d.