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Now here is my bottom line and the core difference between us: In my view, the Left should not take sides in this fight! Rather than accepting the terms presented to us by the two-party system, we should be working to redefine them by drawing on the vast and growing fund of social revulsion against the present order. In a nutshell: rather than siding with marketization-cum-emancipation against social protection, we should be focused on forging a new alliance of emancipation and social protection against runaway marketization. And we cannot do that by working to defeat Trump and to elect Clinton. Far from “pushing her to the left,” that “honorable” interpretation of “critical support” only reinforces the current constellation, while placing our longterm objectives on the backburner. Personally, I am unwilling to see left objectives backburnered every four years out of fear of a Bush or a Trump–all the more so given that what is supposed to save us from the worst only fertilizes the soil that germinates new and ever more dangerous bogeymen, which in turn justify further deferments–and on and on, in a vicious circle. (And that is not even to mention that what is supposed to save us from the worst this time around may itself be worse on foreign policy.) So I interpret the idea of critical support in a way that prioritizes the project of building a new American left by allying the forces of emancipation and the forces of social protection, as opposed to defeating Trump. And I guess that is our principal disagreement.
full: http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/09/american-elections-a-dialogue-on-the-left/
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