"...it is a useless, if pretty, piety to urge everyone to be 'civil' in their discourse. The reason for the inflamed nature of present political debate in the United States is that the country is in decline and economic inequality and insecurity have destroyed our social and cultural fabric..."
On 1/13/11 7:49 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2011, at 8:03 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Come on, Doug. Loughner is indisputably crazy, but that hasn't stopped many from saying, "See? this is what happens when you let those tea-party ideas get about."
> Actually, the liberals, bien-pensant or not, have been complaining about violent language and imagery used by name-brand Republican politicans and right-wing media stars. And the language is really violent. Yes, Loughner is crazy, but madness operates in a social context and frequently expresses itself through political symbols emanating from the discursive fever swamp.
>
>> The bien-pensant Obamist liberals have a problem with the tea party. They were delighted to have it emerge so that they could run against it in order to gather the political class (the 20% of the population with a degree from a good college) with the threat of raving yahoos form the other 80%. But then they discovered that, small and even cynical as the tea-party organizations are, they've attracted the sympathy of the majority of the population.
> No, they haven't really. They've attracted the sympathy of right-wing Republicans. It wouldn't surprise me if these shootings damage the TP brand and support ebbs.
>
>> Now as the Great Recession makes things increasingly bad, the repressed economic desires - the "American dream" - return as a symptom and takes outre forms in the tea party. Nativism and monetary crankiness becomes the socialism of fools as antisemitism once was.*
> Except that there's nothing socialist about it - it's all that old petty bourgeois right-wing self-reliant crap.
>
>> And you know perfectly well that McCarthyism was only synecdochically related to a dipso Republican senator. It's the general name for the post-WWII ideological rectification campaign - beginning in a Democratic administration (with Truman's loyalty program) - to forestall the demand for social democratic reforms of the sort appearing in Europe.
> Sure. Also state power. Keith Olbermann doesn't have that.
>
> Doug
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