http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/is-there-something-wrong-_b_39395.htmlIn the responses to my last post, several posters asked or suggested that our experience with Bush and Cheney (and Baker and Rumsfeld and the Republicans in general) suggests that there is something fatally wrong with our system of government, especially if we have to go through the national convulsion known as impeachment just to get rid of a pack of criminals or prevent them from, at the least, compounding their horrendous record of errors and, at the most, wrecking the nation (and/or a couple of other nations).
At this point, when we are looking at a possible US attack on Iran, this is a question worth pondering. I have been pondering this question off and on for years. I think the answer is two-fold.
First off--in the US, the right is a constant and the left is intermittent, and this has been the case since the beginning. I used to think I knew why the American left in the 1960s and 1970s failed. As a girlfriend of a 1960s leftist (SDS, Progressive Labor Party faction) I could see that the leftists I knew had two things on their minds. One was factory organizing and the other was free love. Usually they took the easy way out (free love) and left the hard part (factory organizing) for another day. As intellectuals, they couldn't really relate to the working class, anyway, and once their personal needs were met (sex, drugs, and rock and roll), their attachment to the cause tended to waiver, or at least to lose focus. There were other things wrong, too, but the main one was that what the leftists were doing and thinking in San Francisco, Cambridge, and New Haven was unfathomable in St. Louis, Denver, and Phoenix. What French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy refers to as "the mobilisation of civil society" took place in the late-sixties US not as a response to labor conditions, poverty, or inequality, but as a response to the draft and the Vietnam War, on the one hand, and as a response to racial injustice in the south on the other. They were two separate movements.
One of my theories about race in American is that Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird (1961) defined the boundary of majority white liberal or moderate opinion about relations between black and white in mid-century US. The book was a best seller and the movie was a big hit and won several Oscars, but in progressive terms, both were extremely cautious. All the book said was that black men deserved equality under the law--that is, that injustice should not be perpetrated. It did not say that injustices already perpetrated could be or ought to be rectified. It's no coincidence that in the 1960s, black leaders wrested control of their own fate from even sympathetic and well-meaning white leftists. Progress could only have been made in that way. But this did not mean that the left as a whole was invigorated by the shift of its leadership to black thinkers and activists. It was not--it was splintered. Civil rights became a separate issue from other class issues, a uniquely American issue that, it seemed, could be solved without any sort of class conflict at all. I remember having this precise discussion with my SDS friend in 1969--was the race problem in the US primarily about class or about ethnicity? He said class, I said ethnicity. The nation has opted since to resolve the issue in terms of ethnicity, and for good reason--in America, class issues are more difficult to solve and not so apparent on the surface; they are always confused by race issues. European history until the last generation has been quite different. In ethnically uniform nations, issues of class are always evident, and the left is far better at formulating issues of class than it is at formulating issues of race.
The movement against the Vietnam War was similarly anomalous, and owed its life, I think, to the fact that all those boys from the hinterlands who were swept up by the SATs in the mid-1960s and sent off to college could not quite believe that they were actually required to serve in a pointless, distant, and abstract war that was nonetheless frightening and deadly. Here they were, gathered together at Harvard and Yale and Berkeley, where they did, at least temporarily, stimulate one another, and they got up a student movement that helped to end the war, but it was a one-time thing. Bush, Cheney, and Co. know this. It was a smart move, in the short run, for them to avoid reinstituting the draft, because they got to have their war, but stupid, over all, because, of course, they don't get to win it.
This pattern, the constancy of the right and the intermittence of the left, is standard in American history, and applies to every "progressive" era. Slavery, for example, was a fact of life; Abolitionism was a movement. Same with labor relations and environmental regulation. This is because in the US, the Constitution defines the outermost left edge of what is possible--individual rights, governmental checks and balances (especially on the power of the executive), dispersal of federal power to the states, the rule of law and the ideal of reasonableness. That edge isn't very far to the left and it is also more of an ideal that a permanent reality, no matter how often everyone on all sides invokes "the Constitution". That left edge is, in fact, simple liberalism, not ideas of class equality, class liberty, or class solidarity. Brotherhood is anathema to most Americans, and so is equality. If the job of the left is to, first and foremost, build a mass movement, then it can't be done on the principle of liberty, because liberty is a slippery idea that is in America called freedom and can as easily (or more easily) lead to the SUV than to national parks, and it can't be done on the principle of equality, because Amrericans don't really care for that principle. Compassion? Justice? Humanity? Those work better, but they don't seem to work for long.
The right in the US is defined not by the Constitution, but by history and tradition. The first principle of this tradition is "Don't tread on me". It is a tradition of genocide, slavery, arms-bearing violence and vigilantism, religious fanaticism, environmental exploitation, and sheer greed; it is a "try and stop me" tradition that Bush and Cheney epitomize. The right wing press in the US has, at one time or another, vigorously defended just about every repugnant practice going, including the death penalty, in part because every one of those practices has made some people rich, and in part because the right resents more than anything being told what to do. Even as genocide, slavery, vigilantism, and a few of our other historical practices have fallen by the wayside, the don't-tread-on-me principle has remained in force because it is the first American principle--most Americans understand and sympathize with it to such a degree that it can be employed to justify such counter-intuitive concepts as a fully-armed populace and preemptive nuclear war, as Bush and Cheney have discovered. But don't-tread-on-me can work against the conservatives, as we saw in the last election, and as we see all over the blogosphere.
More at link...
===================================
EDIT: COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST ONLY
4 OR 5 PARAGRAPHS FROM THE
COPYRIGHTED NEWS SOURCE PER DU RULES.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
