SA wrote:
>
> On 9/1/2010 12:56 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>
> > So long as the system is able to contain dissident factions within the
> > liberal and conservative parties who alternate in administering it, it
> > is unlikely to come under serious threat.
>
> Ah, sorry I didn't understand what you were saying before.
>
> So if I understand correctly now, a political challenge from the left or
> right is only serious if it threatens the existence of the "bourgeois
> democratic system."
Rougly speaking, this is quite correct. Of course there can be varying degrees of "threat," and we are not necessarily dealing with either socialist revolution or fascist coup. It is only necessary that "situations" be created that cannot be easily if at all handled within the framework of "bourgeois democratic" institutions. The Black Liberation Movement from after 1956 did create such a situation, and it led to the dissolution of the Second American Republic (the birth of which was dramatized in _Birth of a Nation_.)
In 1951 my first wife (before we met) travelled by bus from her apartment in Northwest Washington to a warehouse in Alexandria where she had rented a box to store her winter clothes Carrying two heavy suitcases, hot, and tired, she walked into a restaurant, sat down at the counter, and ordered a cup of coffee. The man behind the coutner said, "I'm sorry, I would like to serve you, but it's against the law." She was white, and, she now noticed, had walked into a restaurant with all Black customers and waiters. (There still exists de facto segregatin in many areas of u.s. life, but it _really_ is a different regime, in effect a Third Republic, where events such as Jessie experienced can no longer happen, when racism is not inscribed in public law. Those were more than ordinary "Bourgeois Democratic" reforms that were achieved in the '60s.
And now there is a Know Nothing fringe (of undetermined size and lasting power) in the U.S. which, for example, wants to violate both the rights of prperty owners and the freedom of religin by denying Muslims the right to build a community center on "sacred ground" in Manhattan. That is a threat, though we can't now know how serius a threat, to the " bourgeois democratic system." The limits of the BLM threat in the '60s were marked by heavy repression on the one hand of the Panthers and the draining off of white support, on the other hand, first into the "Clean for Gene" in '68 and then the McGoveren campaign of 1972. The "Revolution" was over, but it had made fundamental changes by leaping the bounds of bourgeois democratic processes -- which then were restored, but on the new basis of abstract (bourgeois) equality. But also a 'regime' in which the 'standing' or permanently instituionalized repressive capacity had been greatly strengthened. We _can_ get a police state now through stnadard channels, without the necessity of a fascist coup -- though I doubt the threat is imminent.
Carrol