i am so NOT a liberal
By shag carpet bomb • Feb 27th, 2008 • Category: Clinton, Election 2008, Obama, Politicsi totally loved how, in the debate last night, Obama shunted aside the label Liberal by saying something like, “if I were a Liberal, would republicans and independents be voting for me?” waddaguy waddaguy.
Why Why WHY are people who espouse progressive politics not holding his feet to the fire on that? I heard zippo about it on the news this a.m. — not that NPR is the final say, but of all the blurbs they could have caught, they kinda missed that one.
And fuck the clinton campaign for the stupidity of trying to make Obama out to be an evil furriner. oh, and the “why am i always first?” whine: almost made me more sick than kickboxing class.
Black Agenda Report has it right, as usual:
The rush to tag along with Barack Obama’s presidential juggernaut shows beyond doubt that progressive “movement” politics is “on its death bed” in the United States, on both sides of the racial divide. Move On gave its millions-strong mailing list no choice but to endorse one or the other of the political twins, Clinton or Obama, affirming its allegiance to “lesser-of-evils” politics. The Nation magazine noted the glaring evidence that Obama is no progressive - and then rewarded him with an endorsement for “reaching out to independent and Republican voters.” Race pride motivates veteran activists and rank-and-file African Americans to imagine Obama’s program for racial equality actually exists, despite all evidence to the contrary. White and Black Democrats reveal that they want nothing more than a ceremonial “seat at the table” - anything to avoid the hard work of opposition to corporate rule.
shag carpet bomb is
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I can’t post ! I don’t like this !
Oh I can ! wow ! but I coudn’t post on “us.ers woudn’t vote for…”
So er, well i could put it here but that would be all confusing, so no.
Anyway, I saw that picture of Obama in traditional dress, and I thought that was interesting : the Clintons playing the race card cleverly by hinting that the problem is not that Obama’s black, but that he is some sort of Taliban. And I thought “clever, as Obama hasn’t done zilch to counter the islamophobic ideology which serves to justify the “war on terror”, what with his threats to Iran and his commitment to war in Afghanista.”
And, of course, the Hillary groupies among Liberal Blogistan will respond with how truly “liberal” Hillary is in comparison, and how she won’t run away from that label.
No…she’ll only use that label like Bubba did when he signed that welfare bill, or when she announces the inevitable invasion of Iran, or when she signs another tax cut giveaway to the wealthy.
And they have the gall to run their “Nader is a GOP agent and an egotistical maniac” nonsense??
If this is what counts as being a “liberal”, then I’m not one, either.
It’s still looking like McKinney, LaRiva, or SMAH for election day for this ‘Dog.
Anthony
[McKinney = Green]; (Gloria) LaRiva = Socialist Workers; SMAH = “Sit My Ass Home”]
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huh. don’t know why you can’t post ilestre. i’ll see if i can.
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as for the Clinton campaign. what a fiasco that is. they are so bad at playing dirty pool, i’m astonished. i thought they’d be a lot better at this.
and yeah, so true the way the obama campaign can’t fight back — at least like we’d want — because they are also interested in maintaining the islamaphobia. fucked all the way ’round.
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anthony — seriously? clinton groupies are that messed up that they think she’s a liberal. holeee cow. i don’t pay attention to her campaign so much, or her groupies, because i don’t know many who are and, well, old meat. obama is fresh meat to criticize! especially since the people who are most “progressive” and even radical marxists are getting in line behind him. i’m so irritated by that. the nation for fuck’s sake. thank dog for Uhuru, BAR. they’re sane.
as for NAder, I personally think he’s a fucking dick. not that i think he’s going to fuck things up, but because he seriously gets the politics backwards. his running for pres is a monumental waste of time, energy, etc. when they should be running lots of local campaigns and building a freakin’ party.
gah!
aside from which, I pretty firmly believe: we aren’t going to vote for our liberation, so fuck elections!
:) i’m smiling when i say that. i mean: it’s fine: go ahead a vote. but i’m really tired of people who spend lots of time on it and get all involved and who say they have a marxish analysis of such things. they call themselves liberals, whatever. but when they say they’re radicals and get all caught up in mainstream politics, foo.
Well, Ms. Shaggy, there are a few in the blogosphere who have fallen hard for Hillary as “The Last Great Feminist Hope”, particularly since she played the “poor me, I’m being persecuted by the big, bad MENZ” card after the media debacle in New Hampshire. (Actually, she did have a pretty damn good point about the media misogyny, especially the assholery of the likes of Chris “The only reason women like her is because she was betrayed by Bill’s wandering dick” Matthews, David Brooks, and some other prime examples.) On the other hand, though, her side’s haven’t been exactly angelic when it comes to throwing the sewage around; go over to Taylor Marsh’s blog and you will see enough Obama bashing and trashing to give Matt Drudge a run for their money.
And there have been some liberal A-list bloggers who have been trying to sell Hillary as the last progressive (especially after John Edwards dropped out of the race). See Susie Madrak’s Suburban Guerilla or LeftCoaster for some prime pimping for Hillary the Super-Progressive (while baiting Obama as a DLC clone in an empty suit).
As to why so many of the “radical Marxists” and a few Left personalities are getting bitten by the Obama bug…well, I guess that desperation for any port in a storm and any hope that anyone other than McCain will get there does have its results. At least, they’re not pimping Ron Paul anymore. Nader may be a dick for nutting up the process, but at least he’s not a racist, segregationist, right-wing dick. (Though, I’d much prefer that he back out and back McKinney and the Greens and let them build a real movement.)
Anthony
Anthony, careful with that ballot La Riva is the candidate for the PSL - the candidate for the pro-Castro SWP being Róger Calero.
(i’d choose the PSL over the SWP myself, and as for campaigning for a candidate with broader appeal, McKinney or Nader would do just as well).
Shag, are you saying that any presence in those elections is futile ? Because there’s a dialectical resolution to the dilemma “we aren’t going to vote for our liberation, so fuck elections!”vs”we can’t let Obama Clinton and McCain pretend they’re the be all and end all of politics”, which is : in order to build widespread opposition to capitalism we must use any forum available to defend our views, and elections are one, and that’s how we’re going to use them.
Ahhhh, sorry….got my left-wing fringe parties mixed up. Thanks, ilestre.
Anthony
please tell me more on this concept ilestre.
and chuckie, if you’re reading, I’ll try to get back atcha re: dialectics on the other thread. this bitch has just chowed down on a high protein meal and now i’m going to go chill. later lovers.
Anthony, that reminds me how when I first discovered that the british SWP and the british Militant tendency were different outfits, and then that the american SWP was a different tendency to the British SWP, and that although their paper is called Militant, they had nothing to do with the British Militant tendency either, and that while the ISO’s paper was called Socialist Worker, they had nothing to do either with the American SWP, nor the British SWP (although they had had with the latter, but then they split)… and then I thought : those trots, hey ?
Shag CB, there is a brief sum up of this approach here, and here’s some Lenin 1920 :
that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life;.(…)
In Great Britain the Communists should constantly, unremittingly and unswervingly utilise parliamentary elections and all the vicissitudes of the Irish, colonial and world-imperialist policy of the British Government, and all other fields, spheres and aspects of public life, and work in all of them in a new way, in a communist way, in the spirit of the Third, not the Second, International. I have neither the time nor the space here to describe the “Russian” “Bolshevik” methods of participation in parliamentary elections and in the parliamentary struggle; I can, however, assure foreign Communists that they were quite unlike the usual West-European parliamentary campaigns. From this the conclusion is often drawn: “Well, that was in Russia, in our country parliamentarianism is different.” This is a false conclusion. Communists, adherents of the Third International in all countries, exist for the purpose of changing — all along the line, in all spheres of life—the old socialist, trade unionist, syndicalist, and parliamentary type of work into a new type of work, the communist. In Russia, too, there was always an abundance of opportunism, purely bourgeois sharp practices and capitalist rigging in the elections. In Western Europe and in America, the Communist must learn to create a new, uncustomary, non-opportunist, and non-careerist parliamentarianism; the Communist parties must issue their slogans; true proletarians, with the help of the unorganised and downtrodden poor, should distribute leaflets, canvass workers’ houses and cottages of the rural proletarians and peasants in the remote villages (fortunately there are many times fewer remote villages in Europe than in Russia, and in Britain the number is very small); they should go into the public houses, penetrate into unions, societies and chance gatherings of the common people, and speak to the people, not in learned (or very parliamentary) language, they should not at all strive to “get seats” in parliament, but should everywhere try to get people to think, and draw the masses into the struggle, to take the bourgeoisie at its word and utilise the machinery it has set up, the elections it has appointed, and the appeals it has made to the people; they should try to explain to the people what Bolshevism is, in a way that was never possible (under bourgeois rule) outside of election times (exclusive, of course, of times of big strikes, when in Russia a similar apparatus for widespread popular agitation worked even more intensively). It is very difficult to do this in Western Europe and extremely difficult in America, but it can and must be done, for the objectives of communism cannot be achieved without effort.
we need a left wing in this country to wrestle from the conservatives–moderates, liberals, even many progressives, and of course republicans–the concept of the popular.
populism, as it has been defined in the US, is a conservative impulse to name and to cultivate. And liberal parties simply respond to the populist impulse.
Obama is not having his feet held to the fire on this and many issues because the fire is absent. I think we can work the discourse on whiteness into this. How many voters simply accept Obama because he is the black other who reflects their potential, their “hopes”? As the other, he can’t possibly be the professional politician.
I think we expect too much of voters. But I am a cynic.
So:
1. There is no fire. Hasn’t been one yet. Not in the US. A relative safety exists in the social sphere that permits people to enjoy zeitgeist while in private places, like the voting cublicle, they can choose the status quo.
2. We have no viable left wing. I don’t know what liberals are. I have read books about Liberalism and really don’t see it. I hear about it. I don’t really see it. I see Conservativism. I see its practice. I don’t see a left wing.
I like something written above in a cynical tone about voting. Shag, maybe, above commenting about the mainstream. The mainstream and getting caught up in it. The mainstream is a concept created by conservatives like Hayek. He called it the liberal social order and spoke of the catalaxy: participation in the market turns enemies into friends–they hey we can all get along; see recent VISA adds. The left wing will not be viable in the mainstream. It will exist as yet another force for strengthening the market/mainstream.
3. Obama is the Handsome Other. As the HO he will stir shit up, should he win the nomination and election; stir shit up real good for a short time and then coalesce into the ultimate progressive mainstream force: a colorless, genderless, classless voice that will be used to represent White Middle Class American, the anonymous guy out there doing things in the market that we (USers) will be encouraged to silently emulate. And that’s AMerican POPulism.
Re-read DH Lawrence’s essay “A Spirit of Place”