[lbo-talk] sprinting rightwards

[Jim Straub]

>
Indeed.  Is it so unthinkable to that a person concerned with social  
justice might go to church, or be in a fraternity?  Of course, this  
debate is about whether or not to participate in mainstream politics  
and organizations as a way to counter the right, and no one has  
proposed joining the far-right itself (the young repulicans).  But  
many catholics, like the rest of society, have a variety of views on  
all sorts of issues, some contradictory, some ill-informed, some left- 
leaning and some right, some critically prescient and some socially  
conscious.  Ditto for members of college fraternities, which are part  
of the mainstream of university life on college campuses and are  
hardly replicas of the caricatures from movies and jokes that we  
countercultural types sometimes stereotype to.

My housemate's dad is a retired teamster who is a liberal-leaning  
catholic; he votes dem and occasionally participates in a small social  
justice group from his church that lobbies politicians against things  
like cafta, but he is also opposed to abortion and probably gay  
marriage; in conversations he can often be moved by my housemate or I  
on one issue or another (and at times sounds downright like a  
bolshevik when talking about the gap between the rich and the poor in  
america today), but make no mistake, he has a sincerely socially  
conservative streak.  Back in Richmond I used to do some political  
work with the few young black members of the local NAACP, who were  
introduced to college through the black fraternities, which make up an  
enormous part of the social life of educated blacks in the south.

Is the left having anything to do with such people so preposterously  
laughable to you?  What does that portend for the future of your  
politics, which shrink smaller and smaller every year, increasingly  
the redoubt of true believers on listserves?  Is the point to win, and  
change society and impact the world?  If so, do we need to be smaller,  
or bigger?  Are we looking only for people exactly like us, or are we  
interested in the lives and thoughts of working people who may (gasp)  
pray in a group of people on sundays, or (shudder) joined a fraternity  
or sorority instead SDS when they went to a state school to get a trade?


>
> Why not join them, if it's politically wise?
>
>  Why not
>> join the
>> Catholic Church?  The Young Republicans?  A frat house?
>> Sure, all those
>> organizations are imperfect, but by the logic in your post
>> above, well,
>> they're all drawn from society as it is, and if we
>> don't join those
>> groups, we're giving up on the struggle.
>>