[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

Matthias Wasser matthias.wasser at gmail.com
Tue Jul 28 09:58:20 PDT 2009


On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:


>
>
>
> I think your view of the American Revolution is both wrong and irrelevant.
> Wrong, because you don't win a guerrilla war if the vast majority of the
> population is against you. Irrelevant because it was a real war, with guns
> that kill people -- and where the collaborators get exported afterwards.
> Unless you are suggesting we should attain our goals by taking up arms
> against the government, this has nothing to teach us.
>

My understanding is that most of the citizenry - and at least certainly the "median" citizen, or rather, I guess, subject - at the time of the revolution didn't have any particular opinions on independence. Rather, a committed core of radicals were able to get events moving faster than people were able to coherently respond to them, and poof, revolutionary upheaval (even if its boundaries didn't extend beyond the political.) Samuel Adams, IIRC, saw himself very explicitly as performing the role modern terrorists often do, instigating the British into acts that would radicalize the populace.


>
>
> As for the history of gay rights, I'm completely baffled. This the perfect
> example of my way of thinking and doesn't support yours at all. Here we have
> the birth of an epochally new morality that is clearly based on the
> conscious creation of a new social identity, the gay identity. It was not
> based on social change, it caused social change. There was no change in the
> economic basis of gay people (which is famously class independent) and no
> change in their biology. But they change their ideas, their perspective and
> their worldview. And that changed how they behaved and what they demanded.
>
> And what they demanded was gay rights -- which is entirely a function of
> changing the morality of the other 98% of society. And they did this
> precisely by confronting society with a contradiction between the reality of
> gay oppression and the American Creed, which defines our national identity.
> Among its principles are that everyone should be equal and that everyone
> has the right to happiness. Gay liberation has almost entirely consisted of
> forcing the rest of the country to face the contradiction between the
> convictions that define their collective identity and the realities of gay
> experience. And over time, the country has drastically changed and is still
> change it's views precisely because of the visceral conflict this causes.
> Their are other visceral conflicts that resist this change and that
> buttress homophobia in place. But it turns out that they're not as strong
> and the need to face ourselves in the mirror and not be ashamed. The amount
> of change that has taken place in our collective norms in the last 40 years
> is staggering, esp. when you consider the centuries and millenia over which
> they didn't. And there has been no correspondingly huge change in
> underlying economic conditions. What social changes that have been have
> been the result of this change in worldview and the result of the struggle
> it created.
>
> In your picture, the gays take power and then force us to recognize them.
> But you don't really believe that. Only nutso conservatives believe that.
> The only force that's been applied here is force of moral suasion. And gays,
> qua gays, don't control shit. It's the moral high ground that is winning
> them this war.
>
> So this seems a perfect example of (1) how a new identity and a new
> morality can be born with underlying economic conditions of the group
> remaining absolutely constant; (2) how a struggle to change worldviews
> depends on forcing people to face a contradiction between their beliefs and
> the convictions that define their collective identity; and (3) why the
> language of morality matters. Because if you don't care about morality, you
> don't care about gay rights. Because that's what they are.

If you start from the premise that the family is an economic unit and take into account what has been happening to gender roles, as an economic category, during this period, I don't think a reading as idealist as this one is warranted. Yes, an incredible moral advance (or if you prefer, moral shift that by definition and like all other moral shifts looks like a moral advance in retrospect) has occurred in the past four decades when there was, broadly speaking, nothing but stagnation for centuries; but why? To say that courageous people had an idea and fought for it is just to restate the fact we start with.



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