> I have been a part of many church based groups. I have never told lies
> about what the U.S. does in the world. But their is a difference between
> participating in a base-community or running support for a sanctuary
> movement or helping Catholic radicals make connections with the union
> movement, all of which I have done, and participating in the debased
> politics of ignorance to violence and oppression which is a bourgeois
> party.
>
> Marvin, I am not asking you to agree with me, but you can at least try to
> see how I see the difference.
=============================
Thanks, your post does clarify.
But I think you also have some misunderstandings - notably, that that some, unlike yourself, are proposing to "tell lies about what the US does in the world." No one on the various Obama-related threads has come near to suggesting that. Debate has essentially turned on whether his campaign contributes to reinforcing or weakening the attachment of Americans to the status quo. Those who argue that it has the characteristics of a protest movement based on the traditional constituency of disaffected students, younger workers and the black community want to see that movement develop in a direction which further illuminates rather than obscures the US role in the world or glosses over its social and economic problems. The disagreement we've been having is about how and under what conditiions such consciousness might be raised rather than about the substance of US foreign and domestic policy. It's the persistent debate around "political pedagogy" applied to the latest set of circumstances.
I also think you profoundly misunderstand the relationship between the church-based and other social action groups and the left-of- centre political parties in the US and elsewhere. They are not at odds with each other, as you imagine. The unions and social action groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, human rights, gays, enviromentalists, antiwar, etc.) have close ideological and organizational ties to the reformist "bourgeois parties". The party activists are typically drawn from the activists from these milieus and the broader part of the population which supports the aims of the unions and allied groups. They don't check their progressive beliefs formed in these organizations for "the debased politics of ignorance to violence and oppression" when they enter the DP in the US and the social democratic parties in other countries. Their beliefs overlap rather than collide. They remain liberals in each case, and they see their participation in the political process as complementary rather than antagonistic to what they are trying to accomplish in the streets outside - that is to say, the legislative realization of their programmes for social change.