Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> At 04:35 AM 1/22/2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >So why didn't they scrap the filibuster? Why don't they fight with the
> >same ardor as Republicans? Why, in short, do they appear to be such
> >pussies, even when they have 60 votes?
>
> Because they don't have the courage of their convictions?
>
> I think it's even worse than that though. I don't think they have
> any convictions. Odious as what they believe might be, Republicans
> believe in *something* anyway.
>
> So Dems don't have the courage of the convictions they don't have.
I'm not sure by what procedures or available evidence we could either confirm or disconfirm this, but I think it is profoundly wrong, and wrongness on this point on the part of leftists can be politically crippling.
My premise would be that without evidence to the contrary we should assume a rough concordance between DP actins and their convictions, and disregard _most_ of their rhetoric as evicence on either their convictions or their principles. And I think the foundation of their convictions is to be found in Jimmy Carter's statement that "The world is unfair." That is, the premise here is that much, perhaps most, human suffering isgrounded in the nature of things, not in the historical accident of capitalism. There have surely been a number of prominent intellectuals over the last century, not all of whom can be assumed to be hypocrites, that have grounded their arguments in this premise, with the crollary that beyond a certain point, efforts to relieve that misery are, as it were, "against nature," and will end up in even worse horror. (Was Edmund Burke a hypocrite or a man without convictions and without the courage of the convictions he did not have?) Or for another parallel take _Hard Times_ by Dickens. Here is an extraordinarily powerful presentation of the malignancy of factory owners and the horror of factory work, but the protagonist, who seems to reflect Dickens's own attitude, refuses to join the union, his perspective being one that subordination to a coloective is no better than the grimness of his work. As a result of this quite principled if wrong stand he is hated by all. (And in Dickens's greatest work, _Bleak House_, in which the Court of Chancellory seems to stand for _all_ 'artificial' institutions of the state, efforts by those 'caught' in that system are seen as leading to madness and death.
My intial point then is that the conciction of efforts at cahnge which are not strictly limited is disastrous however vile those conditons is a position that reasonable men & women can, without hypocrisy or cowadice, strongly hold. It is not evidence that DP leadership _does_ think in this way, but evidence of the _reasonableness_ of the attitude if they in fact do think in this way. Jimmy Carter, despite some of his verbal opposition to some current state actions has _never_ apologized for his role in Afghanistan, in Iran, or in the death of Bishop Romero. He still is far frombeing on "our" side.
I maintain that the DP leadership, for the most part, hold strong convictions and that they have the courage to stand by those convictions. (Hubert Humphrey weakened in his convictions in the last few days of the campaign and began to criticize the war, and thereby came close to winning. But up to that time he had been willing to lose rather than qualify his support of U.S. actins in Vietnam.) Individual candidates of course are apt to put electoral victory ahead of everything else, but I maintain that the Party as a whole, as amajor instittuton of American life, holds firmly and corageously to fundamental convictions as to the limits of possible change and to the necessity to hold those limits even at the cost of electoral defeat. (And of course, those defeats are NEVER permanent. The losing party, even in disasters like 1964, 1980, or 2008 will always be back in power in 8 to 12 years.)
Know your enemy, damn it. And indulgence in the pleasure of calling them names can really frustrate knowledge.
Carrol