Taibbi also forgets that the New Deal coalition was based on a devil's bargain with Dixiecrat racism -- white Southern populists would support progressive economic legislation if the rest of the nation let them keep the colored down. Quite as much as the collapse of manufacturing and preceding it it was the shift of the Democratic Party to the civil rights cause that shaped the "Southern Strategy" of the GOP, formerly the Party of Lincoln! -- but maybe civil rights is another one of those lifestyle things that it's bad for long haired layabouts of nose-ring-wearing students to bother about.
So also is his recycling the silly old charge (repeated ad nauseam by by dear and beloved late teacher Richard Rorty) that "the left," "progressives," "liberals," whoever, aren't interested in economics but only in lifestyle issues and policing political correctness -- as if, for example, all would be well if all the students were to drop out of their gay rights groups, forget about civil liberties, and run down to -- where? -- to support boosting the minimum wage or backing signature card union organizing or opposing whatever the latest free trade deal is.
Fact is, those kids do a _lot_ of economic issue organizing (Students Against Sweatshops, anyone?), as did we in the day -- at my rather apolitical college in the late 1970s the two big student issues were anti-apartheid and union organizing rights.
It's also ignorant of Taibbi to talk about $20K a year college educations as if those were expensive. Univ of Illinois in-state is about that -- a 10+% raise; Indiana U Bloomington (where my daughter is going next year) out of state TRB is about $27K this year. (And on my princely income (ahem, I mean, it's OK, but it's not what I made as a legal pirate, to say the least) she qualifies for $3200 on Pell loans.) Tigertown, my old college, now runs $41,200 for this year. I remember the protests when it topped $7K in unadjusted dollars in 1977. The daughter won't have a Prius either, those suckas cost $22K. Nor will she have a Ford. B'ton is a manageable campus, I'll buy her a bicycle. (Though maybe that shows she's not a red-blooded 'Murican either, and I should get her a Hummer for $30-40K?)
That doesn't go to the main point. We don't know what to do. Finger pointing at well meaning student activists, many of whom are indeed working on economic issues, isn't going to help. Dropping all issues except the ones that concern the immediate economic interests of the working class won't help. And isn't going to happen.
Most frustratingly neither working with the Democratic party will help, since all the Democrats are totally and irrevocably committed to Clintonian triangulation, nor will giving up on the Democratic Party help either, because there is no alternative force by which legislative and other changes might be made. Oh, sure, if we had a big mass movement, but it's the premise of this discussion that we don't.
So, Taibbi's rant is yet another pointless example of the weak turning on each other in frustration and helplessness because we are weak. I don't know what the answer is. I'm just a member of that elite that Taibbi despises, as is he. I wish I could summon more optimism of the will. Pessimism of the mind is, at this point, a glut on the market.
--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net>
> >
> >On Thursday 14 June 2007 10:54, Carl Remick wrote:
> >
> > > So, here's a guy who's been permanently
> mutilated and had his marriage
> > > destroyed by a senseless war, yet *still* he's
> a Semper-Fi-All-the-Way
> > > Marine and takes pride in ridiculing one of the
> Senate's most outspoken
> >war
> > > critics.
> > >
> > > I honestly don't understand why working-class
> Americans are so
> >positively
> > > *thrilled* to get fucked over and over and over
> by an establishment that
> > > has so little compunction about squandering
> their lives.
> > >
> > >
>
<http://homefires.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/will-i-ever-be-ok-again/>
> >
> >I think the answer is pretty simple. In the
> American context, there are for
> >most people two visible possibilities: reaction and
> liberalism. Given that
> >choice, it's quite understandable to me that a lot
> of people choose
> >reaction.
>
> [At first I thought the point you mention, about the
> irrelevance of the
> contemporary left. was well elucidated by the Matt
> Taibbi essay below, but
> as I read further in the Taibbi piece I came to see
> it as hopelessly
> confused -- more an example of leftish cluelessness
> than a commentary on it.
> Oddly, Taibbi seems to think that politics can be
> depersonalized and that
> class consciousness and conflict are inimical to a
> revitalization of the
> left. To me it seems self-evident that the left
> cannot exist *without*
> class awareness and struggle.]
>
> The American Left's Silly Victim Complex
> By Matt Taibbi
> May 23, 2007
>
> ... At a time when someone should be organizing
> forcefully against the war
> in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming
> issue of big-business
> occupation of the Washington power process, the
> American left has turned
> into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who
> defiantly insists on living in
> the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked
> pseudo-intellectual nonsense,
> and quick to run from anything like real conflict or
> responsibility.
>
> It shies away from hardcore economic issues but
> howls endlessly about
> anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy,
> shrieking about the
> notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state”
> (the Patriot Act, Total
> Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way
> that reveals unmistakably,
> to those who are paying close attention, a
> not-so-secret desire to be
> relevant and threatening enough to warrant the
> extralegal attention of the
> FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the
> International ANSWER online
> store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of
> moralistic finger-wagging,
> but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It
> says a lot, but does very
> little.
>
> The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following
> anyone on the American
> left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and
> personnel. No matter what
> it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the
> saddest collection of
> cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under
> one banner on God’s green
> earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really
> doesn’t mind being in
> the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and
> permanently relegated to
> the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage
> industry of polysyllabic,
> ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to
> it, the American left is
> basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail
> party for the
> college-graduate class.
>
> And we all know it. The question is, when will we
> finally admit it?
>
> Here’s the real problem with American liberalism:
> there is no such thing,
> not really. What we call American liberalism is
> really a kind of genetic
> mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous
> parts – a fat, affluent,
> overeducated New York/Washington head crudely
> screwed onto the withering
> corpse of the vanishing middle-American
> manufacturing class. These days the
> Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still
> liberals, but the
> industrial middle class that the New Deal helped
> create is almost all gone.
> In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent
> of the US economy; that
> number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one
> has stepped up to talk
> to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get
> by on low-wage, part-time
> jobs.
>
> Thus, the people who are the public voice of
> American liberalism rarely have
> any real connection to the ordinary working people
> whose interests they
> putatively champion. They tend instead to be
> well-off, college-educated
> yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard
> as they try to worry
> about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing
> federal assistance for
> heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead
> to things that actually
> matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary
> on global warming, or
> the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with
> the British author of
> Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet
> come up with something to
> replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class
> interests that the New
> Deal represented.
>
> Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one
> of the few American
> politicians in history to have survived publicly
> admitting to being a
> socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic
> schism is a fundamental
> problem for the American political opposition.
>
> “Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the
> ‘American left,’” he says,
> “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks
> who are concerned about
> the environment (which is enormously important) who
> are concerned about
> women’s rights (which are enormously important) and
> who are concerned about
> gay rights (which are enormously important).
>
> “But you’re not really referring to millions of
> workers who have lost their
> jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he
> says. “You’re not talking
> about waitresses who are working for four bucks an
> hour.” As often as not,
> he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people
> who have money.”
>
> David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover: How Big
> Money and Corruption
> Conquered Our Government – and How We Can Take it
> Back, is a guy who
> frequently appears on television news programs
> defending the “left” in TV’s
> typical Crossfire-style left-right rock-‘em-sock-‘em
> format. Like a lot of
> people who make their living in this world, he’s
> sometimes frustrated with
> the lack of discipline and purpose in American
> liberalism. And like Sanders,
> he worries that there is a wide chasm between the
> people who speak for the
> left and sponsor left-leaning political
> organizations, and the actual people
> they supposedly represent.
>
> “Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not
> really a grassroots
> movement,” he says. “You have this donor/elite
> class, and then you have the
>
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