>On Jan 15, 2007, at 8:50 PM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>>Now the thing about Yanks is that, basically, they are all populist.
>
>Interesting. You suppose that's why we have one of the highest
>poverty rates and most unequal distributions of income in the first
>world? Why we're such an imperial monster? And why being cosmopolitan
>and cultured makes you a sissy?
Question: I was surfing around looking for places where people mentioned Jo Freeman's _The Tyranny of Structurelessness_ <http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm>. I kept coming across a few places where Europeans complained that the US left suffered from anti-intellectualism. They probably mentioned it because Freeman describes a woman's liberation movement that was, in the early years, deeply suspicious of what they called 'malestream' thinking. In practice, Freeman describes the personal attacks and trashing that went on, whenever a woman was exceptional at anything: speech making, organizing, writing, public relations. She was often trashed. One woman tells the story of being hauled before some informal committee of four women for taking 5 minutes longer on her part of a seminar than they'd wanted.
Anyway, as I read various European's comments about anti-intellectualism, I wondered if anyone had written more about this. Is it a well-known, common critique?
An acquaintance, Brownfemipower, <http://www.brownfemipower.com> was complaining about current versions of radical feminism which seem not to have examined anything that's changed since 1985. That is, they kept hitting on the same principles, but never stepped back and re-theorized in the light of the knowledge gained from political practice. By contrast, she compared that to the Zapatistas who regularly revise their effort in light of practice, retheorizing, etc:
<quote>
ALL of the major movements I know about that are currently working toward a social justice vision have stepped back from the heat of the movement and taken inventory on their movement. And then, of course, adjust accordingly. For heaven's sake, the zapatistas reevaluate themselves *constantly* and have put out major analysis of their shortcomings as a movement and where they plan on making changes. Incite! is another one that just spent the last year evaluating where they were, where they want to go, what hasn't been working, what has, and what they need to do to actually get to where they want to go.
</quote>