[WS:] That sounds more like a definition of contumacy to me. Right wingers do that a lot, especially in this country.
In my book, being a leftist means favoring collective approaches to social issues over individualistic ones.
Wojtek
On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:10 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
> At 10:44 AM 11/12/2009, SA wrote:
>
>> Doug Henwood wrote: > Dem voters are far more likely than Reps to favor
>> social programs, > oppose foreign wars, support civil rights for ethnic and
>> sexual > minorities, etc. Haven't you ever read an opinion poll? People on
>> this list are some of the most erudite I've known, yet basic facts about the
>> political world that are treated as elementary "out there" are received as
>> shocking, surprising, or wildly contrarian in here. Unfortunately, The Truth
>> ≠(Conventional wisdom) * (-1) SA
>>
>
>
> last i knew, part of being a leftist means questioning these "basic facts
> about the political world" as not "elementary" at all.
>
> "This is what passes for a left now in this country. It is a left that can
> insist, apparently, that Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after all,
> he could simply have followed the model of Eisenhower on the Brown decision
> and said that the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and his job as
> president would be to enforce the law) to align himself - twice, or three
> times -- with the Scalia/Thomas/ Roberts/Alito wing of the Supreme Court,
> his declaring that social problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are
> "too big for government" and pledging to turn over more of HHS and HUD's
> budgets to the Holy Rollers are both tactically necessary and consistent
> with his convictions. So, if those are his convictions, or for that matter
> what he feels he must do opportunistically to get elected, why the fuck
> should we vote for him? "
>
> <...>
>
> But here's the catch-22: The left version of the lesser evilist argument
> stresses that it's unrealistic and maybe unfair to expect anything of the
> Dems in the absence of a movement that could push them, and no such movement
> exists. True enough, but where is such a movement to come from if we accept
> the premise that the horizon of our political expectation has to be whatever
> the Dems are willing to do because demanding more will only put/keep the
> other guys in power, and they're worse? I remember Paul Wellstone saying
> already in the early '90s that they'd gotten into a horrible situation in
> Congress, where the Republicans would propose a really, really hideous bill,
> and the Dems would respond with a slightly less hideous one and mobilize
> feverishly around it. If it passed, they and all their interest-group allies
> would hold press conferences to celebrate the victory, when what had passed
> actually made things worse than they were before. That's also an element of
> the logic we've been trapped in for 30 years, and it's one reason that
> things have gotten progressively worse, and that the bar of liberal
> expectations has been progressively lowered. It's also one of the especially
> dangerous things about Obama, that he threatens to go beyond any of his Dem
> predecessors in redefining their all-too-familiar capitulation as the
> boundary of the politically thinkable, as the substance of "progressivism."
> He can manage this partly because of the way that he and his image-makers
> manipulate the rhetoric and imagery of energizing "youth," whose righteous
> fervor is routinely adduced to demonstrate the power and Truth of Obamaism,
> rather than evidence that they just don't know any better.
>
> The Obamistas have exploited the opportunism and bankruptcy of adults whose
> lack of will and direction, and maybe their hyper-investment as parents,
> lead them to look to precocious young people as sources of wisdom and
> purpose. But "youth," first of all, is an actuarial and advertising
> category, not a coherent social group, and one of its defining features is
> lack of experience. Another, lest we forget, is its transience; youth, by
> definition, is a status that disappears with time, and rapidly. (I'm
> reminded of joking with comrades more than three decades ago, after the
> Student Organization for Black Unity - SOBU -- had become YOBU about what
> would be the next step in the progression after Student and Youth.) The many
> organizational debates over the decades about where to set the upper age
> limit of the "youth" section should have been a signal of how arbitrary and
> concocted the category is. And these precocious young, mainly middle class
> enthusiasts, who believe that the world began when they started paying
> attention, have not had the experience of being sold out by Dem after Dem;
> they didn't live through their parents' versions of the exact same overblown
> and unfulfilled enthusiasms for Jesse Jackson, who also supposedly energized
> youth and was historic, and/or Bill Clinton. They haven't seen the Dems run
> a slightly different version of the same candidate and campaign as their
> Magic Negro every four years since Dukakis, or maybe even Mondale or Carter,
> with almost always the same result. Many of them don't understand the
> difference between a political movement and a protest march, chat room or ad
> campaign. And, most of all, they by and large don't feel adult anxieties
> about health care, working conditions, pensions and the like. Therefore,
> they are the ideal propagandists for the fantasy that Obama can transform
> the political environment through his person, as well as his bullshit about
> "community organizing" and the real progressivism being that which
> transcends, even obviates, conflict, and his arsenal of student government
> platitudes like the notion that "hope" has a self-evident, concrete meaning
> or that partisanship is a bad thing or that "politics of gridlock" is
> something more than important sounding filler for use by the male and female
> news bunny corps and their stable of talking head guest commentators.
>
> <...>
>
> http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/where-obamaism-seems-be-going
>
> shag
>
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
> http://cleandraws.com
>
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