[lbo-talk] Local, Austin anti-bailout protesters...

[Sean Andrews]

I haven't seen them...but I live a pretty sheltered life lately as
I've been mostly locked in a room working on my diss.  But there does
seem to be this odd group of people down here that thinks he's up to
something special, as if libertarianism is some sort of antidote
(instead of the Kool Aid it actually is.)  A friend's husband--who
worked in the 2000 Bush campaign and was a political appointee in the
early years--recently told me proudly that he wasn't voting for McCain
and, instead was voting for...Barr.  He said this proudly, as if he
thought I would be somehow impressed with how far he had come in his
political development.

Paul is a whole other bag of worms.  Hearing all these people who
think he's so enlightened--Andrew Sullivan on Bill Maher the other
day, all over the goo-goo-ga-ga libertarian webscape like the Mises
blog--it just baffles the mind.  It actually makes me think that the
point Woj never tires of making about the misaligned obsession of the
60s left---hitting the re-set button on the whole social formation,
but without a real sense of what would replace it--has come back with
a vengance, only this time with none of the actual leftist content.
The only thing, as you point out, that remains of that movement on a
large scale, is its performative cultural elements--Soviet
constructivist lettering, paeans to revolution, etc.  On the other
hand, it seems to attract none of the equivalent hipster elements and
instead has vaulted a whole contingent of geeky, almost wonky
adherents who never tire of telling you of how wonderfully pragmatic
their utopian fantasy would be. Here the boundary between this being
an absolutely natural phenomenon and it needing the kind of careful
planning--pace cool planning a la J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbit languages
not Lenin's central planning--moves fairly fluidly depending on needs
of speaker at the moment. It would be sad if they weren't such useful
idiots for the proto-fascists.

s

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 3:13 PM, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ...have been shown on the news with an inordinate amount of Ron Paul signs and banners.
>
> Any fellow Austinites noticed this? That the weird Austin "enlightened yuppie," spoiled college kid element here is still very much pro-Ron Paul and are the ones on the Capitol steps, with their bullhorns, getting the local media coverage against the bailout?
>
> They even have a huge banner with Paul's face painted on it in that Soviet Constructivist visual style, with the "rEVOLution" slogan on it. Still holding on to the dream....
>
> -B.