me: > "mature" = "unhappy with the Democrats"? Mature also means not working > with or inside the DP bureaucracy but instead pressuring the > apparatchiks from the outside?
CB: > They are "unhappy Democrats" , not "unhappy with the Democrats", > according to that survey. They _are_ Democrats; high percentage will > vote Democrat. This is an indication of their maturity and > non-infantile leftism. Actually, the poll numbers in the original missive don't say they are members or adherents of the DP. Rather, it says they (or 35% of them) want to influence the DP they way the Teabaggers influence the GOP. That's different from being DP advocates or apologists. I don't think people have much of a choice: national elections in the US are a "mug's game" (you can't win unless you have mucho dinero). Thus, I see no reason to criticize anyone who votes for the DP. But pulling a lever or knocking out a chad or putting a black mark in a circle or square isn't a sign of either maturity or immaturity. It can be a symptom of fatalism, cynicism, or irrationality, among other things. Some people, of course, believe in the DP and do it out of hope (misplaced, in my perspective). For most, it's the lesser of two evils. I doubt that many in the OWS movement is _advocating_ voting for the DP. A lot of them who thought that Obama was the cat's meow in 2008 and are now facing the reality. > Apparatchiks is more like university > professors who sit around doing a lot of talking . The GOPsters -- such as Dinesh D'Sousa or Roger Kimball -- also like this kind of anti-intellectual approach, But you and they seem to know nothing at all about the way actual universities work. An "apparatchik" is a middle-level bureaucrat, like the ones that actually help the bosses run most universities, all corporations, and many of the labor unions that are left. The term comes from the way top-down leftist political parties that claim to be "Marxist Leninist" are run. I think the word comes from the defunct USSR, where people learned to fear the apparatchik. Professors have a lot of problems (ask Louis!), but they're not "apparatchiks." me: > Maybe they'll vote for Obama next year, but it's not like the system > gives us a real choice or anything like that. CB: > Yeah, they and probably a huge percentage of those stirred up by > OWS will vote for Obama; very mature non-infantile leftish. The real question is whether Obama and his campaign machine will go beyond lip service to OWS ideals and will actually do anything progressive. It looks like Obama gave up on any populist pretensions in 2010 (inadvertently or consciously) helping the Tea Party rise in the elections). Now, his populist rhetoric seems much more hollow than in 2009 or 2010. And he can use such rhetoric while telling his big-money backers that he really doesn't mean it, since he can't actually do anything mildly progressive (given the GOP control over the House). He can't even easily appoint technocrats (which has been his major achievement so far). His main schtick will likely be to point to how bad the other evil is. -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
