On 2010-02-07, at 12:10 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Feb 6, 2010, at 8:50 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
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>> Is that so different from the anti-war protests at the end of Bush's presidency?
>>
>> The mass of people have focussed on what the president identified as his main goals - the Iraq war for Bush; healthcare and the bailout for Obama. These, the priorities of the political elite, prove to be the faultlines of disaffection for the inchoate mass.
>
> Completely different. The social base and the political content are almost thoroughly opposites. The teabaggers are opposed to Obama's forced march to socialism, which exists only in their minds. The antiwar movement was opposed to imperial war, which was all too real.
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Interesting how my invocation of Weimar, which alluded to the bourgeoisie's historic preference for a strong state during a time of crisis which can spend and cut freely unencumbered by electoral politics - reportedly expressed in Davos in elite admiration for the Chinese model - quickly morphed into a discussion of the current state of US popular political consciousness. I also view the teabaggers and the liberal left as entirely different and moving in opposite directions, recognizing that things would have to get much, much worse and the left would have to become a much larger and more radical threat to the property rights of US capital before the latter would turn to the far right for protection. But the teabaggers are an incipient fascist movement, though they hardly see or would describe themselves in those terms, casting another faint shadow of Weimar.