[WS:] I do recognize that premise, but I think it is demonstrably false. But regardless of the truth function of that premise (i.e. even assuming that it were true) I do not see a logical connection between it and your attitude toward the DP. If the "people in the streets" are the prime mover that can make things moving inside the Beltway, as you assume, how come that this moving happens only on the Repug side (cf. your refrence to Nixon) but on on the DP side? Why can "the streets" influence Nixon but not Obama? Something does not compute here.
Wojtek
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Wojtek S wrote:
> >
> > Carrol: Obama is a DP president.
> >
> > [WS:] I find your persistent singling out the DP misguided, if not
> > irritating. It is like focusing on the tails of a bad coin while
> forgetting
> > its heads. The whole damn thing is bad, not just its tails or its heads,
> > and it will not get any better if you change either side of it.
>
> You are either unable or unwilling to recognize the funamental premisses
> behind all my posts, namely:
>
> Significant change in government poicy has never, once, been initiated
> by office holders except in respnse to gathering disorder 'in the
> strees.' A partiularly dramatic instance concerns a Republican
> president, Richard Nixon. We know from the accounts given by varius
> members o fhis administration that in the fall of 1969 the decision had
> been made to use nuclear weapons against the Chinese installations in
> North Vietnam through which military supplies and other aid flowed. All
> this of course would involve the most meticulous attention to due
> process.
>
> What stopped it? The mammoth Moratorium demonstration in Washngton in
> November of that year. It freaked Nixon out and he changed his plans,
> fearful that public order could not be kept if he initiated nuclear
> conflict.
>
> But what gave us Social Security? Not FDR. He 'gave' it to us under the
> gtyhering public support for the Townsend Plan.
>
> And only under extreme pressure (from a considerable minority of the
> population) did the legislation that ended Jim Crow get passed.
>
> I really am not interested in convincing you of this. I am only
> interested in generating the minimal _non-electoral_ activity and
> organization at this point that will 'grease the wheels' as it were of
> mass mobilization when events that generate such develop.
>
> And it is the DP that regularly absorbs and neutralizes so many of those
> who might otherwise give their time and energy to this task of preparing
> for and perhaps 'ignitin' this kind of politcal action. And I
> particularly see as core enemies of the people that smattering of DP
> politicians who take a 'left' position, thereby contributing to the
> continuyed power of the DP to absorb and neutralize dissent. They will
> _never_ be in sufficient numbers to affect policy, but they will
> continue to enhance the delusions that keep radicals tied to that party.
>
> When no fundamental assumptions are shared, debate is pointless.
>
> Carrol
>
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