[lbo-talk] The Neoliberalization Of Higher Education: What’s Race Got To Do With It?

[Michael McIntyre]

Yeah, the Wallace campaign is the real counterfactual here.  Even with
the disaster that was the Democratic Party in 1968, Nixon barely edged
Humphrey in popular vote.  Nixon was trying to lure Wallace voters
into his camp, and the states that went for Wallace in 1968 overlap
pretty significantly with those that went for Goldwater in 1964, so I
think there's a strong case to be made that LBJ was right when he
predicted that by signing the Civil Rights Bill he was turning the
south over to the GOP for decades.  So, add together the Nixon and
Wallace votes and in 1968 you already get nearly 60% of the electorate
lining up for reaction.  Maybe the most hopeful reading of 2008 is
that it represents a reduction of the GOP to the know-nothing party, a
party that, pace Wojtek, is now a minority of the electorate.  The
price for the marginalization of the know-nothings is an imperial
Democratic party entirely at the bidding of the more rational
capitalists.  The left, as far as I can tell, has no capacity to
organize anything now.  It waits for a savior, thinking it found him
in BHO.    In the long run, we have to think about rebuilding the
capacity for some kind of self-organization in the context of
declining US hegemony, caused by an economic recovery program that
will probably consign us to a(nother) lost decade similar to Japan in
the 1990s.  That is bound to create conflicts of interest among
capitalists, and we have to find a way to organize in a way that
deepens those conflicts.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 2:11 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It is amazing how many people still live in the illusion created by a few
>> radical student protesters in the 1960s - thinking that the whole country
>> will be like them if only properly "organized."  Well, the rest of the
>> country went for Nixon while a few student radicals went to the streets.
>>
>
> While empirically true, and perhaps others know the specifics better than I
> do, but would Nixon have beaten Johnson? would Nixon have beaten Kennedy?
> would Nixon have beaten Kennedy if King hadn't been killed? I don't remember
> that Nixon ran away with the thing... though, perhaps, that was due to
> Wallace's campaign...
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