--- shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> yah. but the message is a terrifying one. I can't
> say right now that it's
> more terrifying than Clinton's but from what I've
> read of his speeches,
> while I wouldn't call it fascism, I think Carrol is
> very correct about
> this: Obama's charismatic leadership -- his use of
> rhetoric (which is very
> dependent on reptition -- what others, analyzing
> Catherine MacKinnon's
> rhetoric, have called the copula) -- lays the
> groundwork for a kind of
> patriotic nationalism that is deeply disturbing.
[WS:] Excellent point, indeed. I came to a smilar conclusion when not long ago I heard an interview with Kerry on NPR, in which Kerry explained his endorsement of Obama by the need of American unity and that Obama is best qualified to make it happen. National unity despite deep diferences is not only the core of fascist rhetoric, but the central idea of Hobbesian Leviathan - give in to the sovereign for the sake of "social contract" and social peace - on the sovereign's terms, of course.
I think that the very idea of bipartisanship and national unity in the times of the greatest economic divisions and inequality since 1920s is deeply disturbing and needs to be vigorously refuted. It is basically an attempt to solidify and legitimate the caital's power grabs during the last twenty or so years. I think that message ought to be not that of "national unity" but that of class struggle to take back what the twenty years of moving to the right took away.
Amerika is a deeply divided nation, and that cannot be papered over by the empty rhetoric of national unity and hope. If a genuine political expression of that fact will not develop, one day things may turn the way they did in Kenya - where deep socio-economic divisions are settled with machetes, since political solutions have been blocked.
BTW, expropriating the expropriators, and executing the executives has a ceratin appeal.
Wojtek
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