Friday, December 23, 2005
Faith in Revolution
What we lack now is not so much a plan for rapid social change (the famous REVOLUTION) but just the simple faith that anything much new can be accomplished. Years ago the Arthur Schlesinger Juniors began panting after the William Buckleys.
It was the liberals who had overseen the birth of the National Security State. Truman accepted the paternity. He got the best bang by not passing the buck. But for his successor Adlai Stevenson it was not a baby but a hot potato. He prayed in public that the the buck in fact be passed from him.
Stevenson became the architype for the liberal's dignified method of defeat. His name is first in an inglorious list of losers whose names glow phosphoresently - Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Eagleton, Edwards, Carter, Humphrey, to name a few.
In their search for a stable ruling center to fob their power off upon, the liberals went neo. In their Urge to Power, the conservatives went tina (there is no alternative).
Rapid social change (good old Revolution Now) became the truly unthinkable. This was the best of all Darwinian worlds. The Haves and the Havemores were happily red in tooth and claw and black in the bottom line. For the havenots and havenevers, evolution was a slow, slower, slowest Chinese water torture, a working class tortoise that never caught up with the capitalist hare.
The Movement of the sixties and seventies formulated the terms of the overthrow of the 4 Horsemen of Bourgeois Democracy: classism, sexism, racisn and ageism. Eisenhower, the polidiot savant, called the cancerous growth the Military/Industrial/Political Complex. The 1st Kennedy, who was at once the last liberal and the first neoliberal, died of the contradiction. The 2nd Kennedy was killed for representing a fusion of the Movement and political party. This became the McGovern reform party - loaded down with quotas, aspirations and entitlements. This was killed by party bosses. Rule fell safely into the hands of the WORMS for whom a Strict Constitution and a Stricter God had made the world. (WORMS: White Old Rich Men)
Once the wave of rapid social change was flattened in the eighties, the Movement was dispersed and its remnants installed as the Left Behind of the Democratic Party. Leftist popular fronters disappeared into the labor movement to stave off the fascists. Enironmentalists relentlessly lobbied for the final legislative fix. Feminists served the Democrats in the name of Presidential power to make Supreme Court appointments. AfroAmericans were integrated - on the Disney Channel. The Peace Movement was openly robbed of its dividend while the Demomcrats fluttered their hands in dignified hopelessness. And, in a timidity that summed up the era, the Nader/Green Party succumed to the Anybuddy of Bush DLC fraud and on the national level went yellow to the kernal.
The Vacuum is now. A new alliance will be born, something I hopefully call the 7th International: the Libertarian Labor Green Rainbow Alliance!?! This space is reserved for mediations on this alliance.
It was the liberals who had overseen the birth of the National Security State. Truman accepted the paternity. He got the best bang by not passing the buck. But for his successor Adlai Stevenson it was not a baby but a hot potato. He prayed in public that the the buck in fact be passed from him.
Stevenson became the architype for the liberal's dignified method of defeat. His name is first in an inglorious list of losers whose names glow phosphoresently - Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Eagleton, Edwards, Carter, Humphrey, to name a few.
In their search for a stable ruling center to fob their power off upon, the liberals went neo. In their Urge to Power, the conservatives went tina (there is no alternative).
Rapid social change (good old Revolution Now) became the truly unthinkable. This was the best of all Darwinian worlds. The Haves and the Havemores were happily red in tooth and claw and black in the bottom line. For the havenots and havenevers, evolution was a slow, slower, slowest Chinese water torture, a working class tortoise that never caught up with the capitalist hare.
The Movement of the sixties and seventies formulated the terms of the overthrow of the 4 Horsemen of Bourgeois Democracy: classism, sexism, racisn and ageism. Eisenhower, the polidiot savant, called the cancerous growth the Military/Industrial/Political Complex. The 1st Kennedy, who was at once the last liberal and the first neoliberal, died of the contradiction. The 2nd Kennedy was killed for representing a fusion of the Movement and political party. This became the McGovern reform party - loaded down with quotas, aspirations and entitlements. This was killed by party bosses. Rule fell safely into the hands of the WORMS for whom a Strict Constitution and a Stricter God had made the world. (WORMS: White Old Rich Men)
Once the wave of rapid social change was flattened in the eighties, the Movement was dispersed and its remnants installed as the Left Behind of the Democratic Party. Leftist popular fronters disappeared into the labor movement to stave off the fascists. Enironmentalists relentlessly lobbied for the final legislative fix. Feminists served the Democrats in the name of Presidential power to make Supreme Court appointments. AfroAmericans were integrated - on the Disney Channel. The Peace Movement was openly robbed of its dividend while the Demomcrats fluttered their hands in dignified hopelessness. And, in a timidity that summed up the era, the Nader/Green Party succumed to the Anybuddy of Bush DLC fraud and on the national level went yellow to the kernal.
The Vacuum is now. A new alliance will be born, something I hopefully call the 7th International: the Libertarian Labor Green Rainbow Alliance!?! This space is reserved for mediations on this alliance.
# posted by Paul Encimer : 9:53 PM
