I started a note this morning reacting to Alan Rudy's rant. It is extraordinary. It seems increasingly clear that the greatest enemies of developing a left politics in the US now are people who identify as leftists. This much willful misreading by people who aren't otherwise illiterate has to mean that ideology's at work. And I think what the reaction to Walter shows, as does all the persistent Obamamania, is that too many of those who imagine themselves leftists have framed their worldviews and understandings of the limits of political imagination entirely within the horizon of multiculti neoliberalism. I fear this indicates how hegemonic the "doing well by doing good" mindset has become -- people are too comfortably settled into familiar grooves of being on the left by expressing "support" for the right positions without having any bearing on their own daily lives and practice -- e.g., combining e-activism and pc yuppoid consumerism.
All that taking cues from those "who are in the trenches" I'm beginning to think is part of the aversive mechanism. Who is in the "trenches" besides those who function increasingly as the neoliberal regime's social service coordinators? That's who is most directly and immediately committed to the race line and other expressions of identity politics. And, besides, why should we give trumping word to those whose practice hasn't produced anything in three decades except redefining the terms of victory to accommodate steady defeat?