> [I forwarded some of the WBM thread to Adolph Reed, who writes...]
I think that straw man next to Alan probably feels devastated by the
attack. I'll probably jump in a few hours, but right now this feels a bit
like a non-conversation. robert wood
>
> 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?
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