WS seems to have gotten politics and the National Football League a bit mixed up. The Super Bowl (every 4th Novemeber) is all in all.
But leaving his mumblings aside, the frustrating actuality at present is that left positions, concretely described, are _enormously_ popular among a very large swath of the u.s. population. What is _not_ popular, and which in any nation is only very rarely popular, is an active conviction of the possibility of change. (I wrote a series of posts in the early years of lbo-talk rejecting "criticisms" of "the left" on the basis that, as is normal, "The Left" did not exist, though there were 10s of thousands (or more) of individual leftists and hundreds of small leftists local groups. My argument was that this was _NORMAL_; that there was no need to explain left weakness: what needed explanation were those scattered instances in which an active and coherent (though not necessarily "unified") left did appear.
The potential opened by Arab Spring, Wisconsin, & OWS is still there, and there continues to be a desperate need for more active* participants in local groups of various types. Gramsci was partly wrong when he wrote that while an army could not create a general staff, a general staff could create an army. It's not generals we need, however, but more non-comes. It takes ten to fifteen active participants to plan and implement an action that catches any public attention -- and it is the existence of visible action, not arguments, that 'recruits' from the millions of passive leftists in the u.s. (Not only do _arguments_ not change any minds, but lacking a highly visible movement, the existence of arguments remains a secret.)
Carrol