<div>The problem is not that there is a lack of ideas about how to improve the world; the problem is that the good guys do not have sufficient power or support to bring these things into being, to win battles over them. Leftos being a country apart from their orddinary neighbors is not a problem because it keeps us from the secret and brilliant ideas of the sentimentalized masses, but rather is a problem because none of our goals can be acheived without the support and massed power of millions of people in concrete ways.
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<div>I'm as populist or whatever as they come, but I find the sentimentalization of the people and bottom up etc highly annoying. Most of such idealization of workers would be remedied if being a leftist involved ten mandatory hours per week of housecalling random working-class people for organizing conversations.
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<div>I used to live on 4th St in Columbus, btw. Definitely proto-american in the sense that wendy's (fast food) originated there, but in terms of political economy of the city, it is structurally a sun-belt city located in the rust belt, has disproportionately white-collar population owing to predominance of insurance and university as town's main industries, and is an overwhelmingly dem city--- while the general US public voters are more split between the two parties.
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br>This is all at a high level of abstraction. What good ideas do the<br>American people - a large and almost unimaginably diverse group, I
<br>know, but I'm thinking of moderately educated people below the<br>professional/managerial class - have that are so wonderful that left<br>intellectuals fail to acknowledge?<br><br>There's an idea on the left that the really good stuff should
<br>percolate up from below, and the duty of intellectuals is to listen<br>and learn from such but I really would love some concrete examples.<br>You live in Columbus, Ohio, which is almost by definition the<br>prototypical American city, so surely if it's out there, you've heard
<br>it.<br></blockquote></div>