________________________________ From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Wed, August 25, 2010 11:57:42 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] letter to editor
Below is a letter I sent to The Nation's editor in response to Eric Alterman's excellent piece in the August 30/September 6 issue.
Wojtek
Eric Alterman’s [August 30/September 6] otherwise excellent list of institutional roadblocks to progressive reforms in the US has one glaring omission: the international context. Any progressive reform in this country was enacted mainly by forward thinking elements of the American ruling elite responding to pressures created by international developments. The New Deal followed in the footsteps of welfare state emerging in Europe and rapidly growing power of the USSR and Germany that used social policy to muster popular support for their regimes. The War on Poverty ensued after the wave of national independence movements around the world, to which the USSR and China provided material and ideological support. Apparently, the forward thinking elements in the US administration realized that Jim Crow America was poorly suited to win the “battle for hearts and minds” in the Third World.
Conversely, the current absence of any serious overseas challenge to the US hegemony makes the ruling elite confident and unwilling to make progressive concessions. The US polity is inherently retrograde and as long as it does not feel the heat of international pressure, the intrinsic paralysis of bipartisan politics will effectively derail any attempt of truly progressive reforms in this country.
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