Doug. Seriously. It is as if you would ask why a botanist isn't spending more time talking about taxidermy.
I am not suggesting that every lefty study the political right, but that's my niche. I do not think I exaggerate the problem, but over the past 30 years I have often been part of an early warning system for progressives to help them anticipate coming trends and projects from the political right. My expertise is such that I now get asked to contribute to seriously scholarly books, journals, and conferences on the subject. I don't ask that you agree with me, just that you try to take my work a bit more seriously and not trivialize it by misrepresenting what I write. I don't want to bind the Left to the Dems, which I have been opposing for 30 years. And for the past 30 years I have urging the left to rebuild all sorts of militant autonomous organizations to force the Dems to move to the left, because that is what strong social movements do to political parties.
I suggest taking the Tea Party Movement seriously not because I want to try to organize them, but because they are ALREADY out-organizing the left in terms of millions of average of our neighbors whose antipathy toward the bailout is being marshaled into a frame in which the problem is big business and big labor and big government and the solution is unregulating capitalism for the small owners. Shag is correct about that being the frame.
Now the Tea Party movement is pulling the Republican Party to the political right, and the arrogant isolated fools in the Democratic Party are moving to the right with them while calling a significant and angry and bitter and resentful social movement of white people, many of whom own guns, a bunch of lunatics and ignoramuses.
The story doesn't end well if the script doesn't get rewritten by the Left.
-Chip
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org on behalf of Doug Henwood Sent: Wed 4/7/2010 2:30 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Demographic composition of the Tea Party
Carrol Cox:
> I am getting increasingly impatient with this utter failure on the
> part
> of so many who call themselves leftists to recognize that the issue is
> organizing ourselves. Then we can talk about "reaching out" but not
> before.
Chip Berlet:
> I'm with Carrol on this one...
Then why do you spend so much time on the right-wing "threat"? Is it a way of organizing ourselves, a way of binding the left to the Dems, or what?
Doug ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk