> The left has been lost in the barren textualism of the academy while the
> general public has been drawing its own conclusions, many of them nutty
> inarticulated feelings easily manipulated by the religious right
Oh, there are a few barren textualists out there, but also many fine people in academia, who do indispensable work with the social movements. Still, the deeper problem with class politics is context: the US Empire is falling apart, and its brand of military-industrial monopoly accumulation is going extinct (which is why the US is running current account deficits of 6.8% of GDP, an eye-popping figure).
The US badly needs a post-Imperial politics, which means directly confronting the Empire and convincing Americans they don't really benefit from it -- a polite way of saying, the roughly $600 billion which the US spends on its military-industrial complex ought to be spent on worthier things.
-- DRR