On Mar 19, 2008, at 10:09 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Mar 19, 2008, at 9:53 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>> Why? To me, that seems not only extreme but self-destructive.
>> There is
>> no way that liberals or the left will ever change the convictions
>> of this
>> country except by changing the dominant interpretation of the
>> American
>> creed. And this formula is exactly the means by which you do that.
>
> It's completely within the paradigm of the wretched American
> constitutional system.
Forgive me the bad taste of responding to myself, but I should have added: Liberals are the last people you should expect to challenge these foundational convictions. They *love* the constitution - it's like scripture to them. At heart, they're elitists who don't trust popular power, and prefer instead experts and elites to run things. That's why they're so infatuated with the Supreme Court. They just want their elites to run things, instead of the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie in Congress and the plutocracy in the executive branch. As Adolph Reed once said to me about a pair of elite liberals we both know well, they think if you just got all the smart people together on the Vineyard one summer, the could solve everything. There's a reason why right populist hatred of liberals works so well - there's more than a little truth to it.
Doug