Thanks, nor I. I'm approaching this less as a historian than someone who's lived through the times we're discussing. Overall, I think the Left has never been coherent enough in my lifetime to do much more than make a strategic nudge here and there and, in hindsight, I think we've done remarkably well with what we've had. I have a serious bone to pick about how little we've had to work with.
A somewhat deeper caveat about what you're suggesting is that it reads way too much thought into decisions that are not really much more than those of a paramecium. They turn to what they think will warm them or, at least, make them feel warmer. The problem is that American civic culture was never very ideologically defined or obsessed with the battle of ideas in the 1960s. That pathetic level of analysis and understanding has just degenerated entirely. The former president of my union told me a few weeks ago that I'm engaged in a "crime against humanity" by not voting for Biden and an old socialist comrade recently asked me whether I was on the Republican payroll. That kind of shit-stupid is what you get from those in responsible positions. I have another Biden supporter shrieking that I want the dangerous reactionary working class people in her neighborhood are going to beat her up if Trump gets a second term. But the point isn't really this kind of individual madness. It's how media and political institutions shape it all into what passes for a collective political decision. I honestly think there are things at work other than an excess of libertarian thinking. The quite standard idolatry of the free market is quite sufficient to get us here. By the 1980s, the Republicans--and, yes, the Democrats, too--embraced that notion that what's good for the market is good for the society. This deepened over the next twenty years into systemic faith that capitalism means that greed is a social good--and, conversely rationalizing draconian cruelties inflicted on those who were least able to protect themselves. This converged with a corporatized Fundamentalist Christianity to create a religion of cruelty with the new century. Those who followed those first steps of Reaganism are going to find it very hard to backtrack and reconsider what they've been sanctioning. That's gotten progressively harder for them but not hard enough to make them rethink their assumptions. And, of course, the Democrats are constitutionally unwilling to challenge those assumptions. But I honestly wouldn't chalk this up to some kind of libertarianism that swept us away in the 1960s. If that were so, how could we have not had a serious shakeup in the party system, particularly as both engaged in that persistent expansion of the war machine year after year? Then there's the simply grotesquely antirepublican and antidemocratic centralization of the national police powers Cheers, Mark L. On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 10:06 PM <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 08:22 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Sorry about that--I apologize for my tone. I have great respect for > Comrade Lause as a historian and am not seeking a social media pissing > contest with him, however upsetting I may find his dismissive response to > my post. > > What I meant by saying that we are the enemy is that the Left as a whole > capitulated to a form of neoliberalism by embracing the essentially > libertarian ideology of eg the pop music industry and its leading figures > as well as key elements of actual libertarianism during the struggle > against the Vietnam War. This IMO has contributed to the absence of any > popular socialist tendency in the US at present. > > We now have a widespread notion that even in the absence of the unstable > fusion once known as "liberalism" in the U.S., you can have a valid > non-socialist Left, which has IMO influenced the white and non-black > "allies" of BLM to the extent that they are protesting not only police > racist murder but the broader injustices and innate unsustainability of > capitalism. > > Comrades Lause, Meeropol, and Proyect (et al) are of course not personally > to blame for this,--on the contrary--but the ideological suicide of the > Left over the past three quarters of a century remains the responsibility > of the Left as a whole. > > Putting it another way, the de facto ideology of the encampments may > increasingly represent the transformation of a revolutionary potential to a > counter-revolutionary potential. It has much in common with the underrated > persuasiveness of Trumpism, which gives concrete form to something new in > the world of ideologies that has much in common with its nominal Left > antagonists. > > WITBD? > > I'll only add that Trump's resolute hostility to the very notion of social > infrastructure and actual governance has many points of coincidence with > the vulgar Graeberism of the encampments. The only reason for voting Biden > is to preserve such luxuries as a Postal Service and the CDC for another > two or three years so that the Left can come to grips with its failures. > The collapse of liberal democracy isn't something to cheer on even if it > may be inevitable. > > Again--trying to keep this above the waist and serious. > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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