On Aug 8, 2011, at 10:47 AM, Carrol Cox wrote: > I trust the judgment of Glen Ford.
I admire Ford a lot, but really, Carrol, the TP isn't just a bunch of nativist yahoos. A lot of them are amped-up libertarians who hate social spending. Seth Ackerman has a nice piece on how liberals use the charge of "racism" against the TP because it's a lot easier than arguing with them: http://jacobinmag.com/summer-2011/liberals-and-racism/ > Make no mistake; my intention isn’t to praise or defend the Tea Partiers or > the braying geriatrics who bum-rushed the health care reform town halls two > summers ago. It is to ask why liberals, when faced with the political idiom > of the American Right, gravitate so insistently toward racialized accounts of > their motives. The Right talks endlessly about freedom, defined as negative > liberty; yet liberals in their ordinary political discourse have no critique > of the right-wing concept of freedom. The Right loudly and consistently > champions free markets and capitalism; yet liberals have no principled > critique of free markets or capitalism. > > Unable or unwilling to articulate any coherent rebuttal of their opponents’ > ideological rhetoric, liberals instinctively resort to accusations that the > opposing ideology is covertly racist because racism – unlike Reaganite > celebrations of the magic of the market – requires no refutation. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
