[lbo-talk] Jane Hamsher, dissident

Bob Morris bob.morris at gmail.com
Fri Dec 4 00:53:54 PST 2009


My take:

FireDogLake and Hamsher are getting more radical and could well be someone to ally with.

CrooksandLiars seems fixated on alternately being scared of or trying to ridicule teabaggers. Ditto for AmericaBlog. They seem more stuck in the Democrat is Good / Republican is Bad mindset, but are also getting disillusioned.

However, it occurs to me that just maybe other potential allies exist.

A progressive Buddhist friend and his wife moved from LA to rural Utah a few years ago . He tells me most of the teabaggers he knows there are Democrats and aren't even slightly racist. They don't like government intrusion or the banksters.

The Democratic Party and others could find serious organizing material here, but first they need to stop thinking of gun-owning rural folks as being racist yahoos. Joe Bageant wrote a book about that, "Deer Hunting With Jesus" and he's right. The Republican Party listens to what rednecks say. So they end up supporting Republicans even though it's against their class interests. Too often progressives and liberals just insult rural whites instead.

But maybe there's common ground. My friend sure thinks there is. Imagine what a genuinely broad-based coalition like that could do. the populist upsurge in the country could go right or left. Let's try to tilt it leftward.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> On Dec 2, 2009, at 7:29 PM, SA wrote:
>
> So in the spirit of that thread: Are these people radicals could
>> profitably ally with? (Insert your own definition of radical).
>>
>
> Sure, why not? That's exactly the sort of productive disillusionment with
> President Hopey I was looking for.
>
> Doug
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- Bob Morris

http://www.google.com/profiles/bob.morris



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