[lbo-talk] Fwd: Re: Politics vs the DP

[Carrol Cox]

On 6/15/2011 1:53 PM, SA wrote:
> By the way, if Heaney can say that drafting American men made protest 
> go *up* in the 60's (despite a liberal president), surely it would be 
> reasonable to suppose that fewer American men getting killed in Iraq 
> would make protest go *down* (regardless of whether a liberal was 
> president).

Definitely. There was a huge turnout in October 2001 to the initial 
meeting of the BNCPJ. (And that size sparked a moment of false hope in 
me.) And there was another spike just before the Iraq war. But in 
general the curve was downward from the beginning. Like earlier issues 
after the early '70s (Central America, Apartheid, various local issues) 
the anti-war movement of the last decade has been "forced" by a core. 
Most people just yawned. But Obama more or less crushed even that core, 
who are turning to other issues. Glen Ford noted that Obama was a 
"problem" for the Black left; he's a problem for all of us, though less 
intensely I suppose than for black leftists.

Carrol