[lbo-talk] Why Obama doesn't suck

[Alan Rudy]

yeah, well, kinda, since that's also true of Republicans who don't always
look weak and... electoral victory fundamentally depends on veiling the
simple fact that each party is a/the party of capital.  there is a set of
strong, pro-middle class, pro-capital arguments Dems could make but they are
afraid to make them because - after Clinton's and Obama's success based on
appropriating first neoliberal and then neoconservative arguments from the
Republicans, Democrats are now the left wing of the Republican Party and
have almost completely foresworn any kind of allegiance to those other
arguments.

furthermore, Doug's position - as he knows - also does a great job of
discounting the role of social movements, the semiotically and materially
contradictory character of the legitimating ideologies of public democracy
and private accumulation and the internal contradictions of capitalism

in fact, historically, its as weak as SA's attributing the shift of the
national discourse towards a melding of neoconservative and neoliberal
positions to Goldwater and grassroots support for him (though, to be fair, I
am almost surely taking what he wrote and running further with it than he
intended).  On the one hand, whoever the Republicans put up in 1964 was
going to lose because of JFK's post-assissination deification, Johnson's
political savvy and Johnson's being a southerner.  On the other hand, and
here I am going to absolutely agree with Charles, the shift to the right is
much more about racism, sexism, nationalism, anti-environmentalism,
anti-unionism, etc. than it is about a Goldwaterian discourse.  At the same
time, to argue that Goldwater was nominated as a result of grassroots
organizing would seem to have to be predicated on an argument that what the
National Review did during the 50s and 60s was grassrootsy... to conflate a
top-down patrician conservatism with a bottom-up populist conservatism.
That latter melding lies in Nixon's Southern Strategy after the racist,
militarist, and sexist populist revolt against civil rights legislation,
Black Power/urban "unrest", draft card and bra burning, and sex and drugs
and rock and roll.

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Joel Schalit <jschalit at gmail.com> wrote:


> nicely put, doug.
>
> On Nov 16, 2010, at 1:40 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > I have solved this problem forever: the Dems are a party of capital that
> is forced for electoral reasons to pretend otherwise on occasion. That's why
> they always look weak and full of shit.
> >
> > Doug
> >
>