@Monolycus, #50:

Yes, actually, it was your comments on the other thread that pissed me off enough to have launched into the diatribe in response to gmac’s query that led to the genesis of this thread in the house that Jack built.

I, uh, kind of guessed as much.

you went on to express how sorry you were for the idea that another poster might have had the poor taste to have been born Southern.

So, you can’t recognize sarcasm, and this is my problem?

I wish you had mentioned the “extra pity” angle there, because I would have jumped on it earlier as being indicative of the same type of self-congratulations that homophobes indulge in when they don’t want to grant “special rights” to gays. Maybe you can explain to me how it works that your lack of compassion and refusal to work with any group you’ve decided is “disproportionately small” is particularly progressive.

Well, let’s go back and look at what I said:

The first direct point is that this article starts with a plea for pity for poor whites above other poor folks, when in fact white people make up a disproportionately small percentage of the poor, and have done so for decades. The appeal of the beginning of this article is an inherently racist one — these particular poor people deserve your pity because they’re white, and it’s just so hard to be white in America.

Where do I say I don’t want to help poor people? I just said I don’t want to give extra pity to poor white people for being white. I don’t want to give extra pity to poor black people either. To put it another way, their race is not a reason to give them compassion. I dunno, Monolycus… I hope you don’t teach literacy, because your reading comprehension is terrible.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Oct 2 2006 22:30 utc | 67

The problem I have with all these rants (and I’ve heard thirty years’ worth of ’em in various movements) about how we have to Not Scare the Public by Being Too Far Out There is that the real work of speaking truth to power and uncovering high crimes and injustices has often been done by the very people who were “too far out there.” Suffragists who chained themselves to railings. Ghandians who span their own cotton, collected their own salt, burned their pass cards (and were mocked and derided in the imperial press with the same vituperation we hear in the bosses’ media today). Abolitionists who actually consorted with Black people in public [gasp!] instead of just listening to anti-slavery sermons on a Sunday. Refuseniks. The ANC.
Back in the late 1960’s one argument heard throughout the women’s movement, to take just one example, was that lesbians in the movement should stay strictly in the closet, as “ordinary women” would be put off and alienated from feminism if it was associated in their minds with “perversion.” In other words, let’s accept bigotry and replicate it, so as to get our message through to the bourgeoisie — to the extent that we condescendingly deem their little minds capable of assimilating it. Let’s make a kiddie-version of our movement values, a kind of happy-meal, a nonthreatening, bowdlerised version suitable for primetime, and somehow that will be the camel’s nose in the tent and will allow the rest of our values… someday… to be accepted.
So Black civil rights movement leaders were advised to keep straightening their hair and wearing sunday school clothes so as not to scare Whitey, and feminist leaders were advised to look and act as femme as possible, and so on. Because catering to people’s bigotries — or not challenging our own — was seen as the way to win hearts and minds. Seems like low expectations to me.
And as it turned out the gay rights movement was far more popularisable than feminism [since it challenged mere prejudice rather than male privileges] — feminist advances in reproductive autarky, physical security and employment equality have been harder to defend and more quickly rolled back than gay rights (the constitutional marriage ban has not yet been achieved but abortion is for all practical purposes unobtainable in most states). And Black-looking Black folks can now be media stars, admired and adulated by legions of white kids. It turned out that it wasn’t the surface appearance or “respectability” that was so scary in the first place, it really was the values. Black-looking Black folks are just dandy so long as they’re helping to sell corporate cr*p.
Sugar coating core values with pretty spokespeople imho isn’t going to help. If an otherwise presentable, respectable, popular person espouses the “wrong” values at the wrong historical moment then their good looks or respectability will not save them… go read up on the HUAC years again: when the national hissy fit is in full spate then respectability counts for nothing, it merely proves what deep cover those clever Red moles use when undermining our mighty nation 🙂 “Who would ever have thought that nice, nice man was a Russki fifth columnist!”
The reason that the mighty wurlitzer bores on and on about “ugly feminists” or “creepy little anoraks” or “smelly hippies” or “loony vegans” is not really because of the personal characteristics of those people — it’s because of their values, which threaten the elite in some way and have to be trivialised or demonised or both. They would be attacked in any case, on real or invented grounds… such as the “spitting on vets” incident that never happened, yet is an article of faith for Viet Nam revanchistas. Underneath the war of media appearances really is a war of ideologies. If you actually spit on veterans, that’s bad strategy and will be seized on by the wurlitzer and used to discredit your cause; and if you don’t, then they will say you did anyway, and legions will believe it. You can’t play ball with these people ‘cos they cheat 🙂
If it hadn’t been Jane Fonda it would have been somebody else singled out as the poster boy or girl for wingnut rage against those who dared to challenge the war mythology. If Jane had been older and had more gravitas she’d have just been reviled and mocked in a different way. The “damage” she “did” was not anything she did, it was the system’s inevitable response to any visible and appealing figurehead of opposition. If you have no targets of opportunity then you have no writers, no orators, no artists, no catalysts. They demonised MLK in the end, prior to bowdlerising his image and message and assimilating it into the Official Story in the classic Soviet “rehabilitation” style.
In the end imho we might as well just stand up for what we believe in, do what seems right, and stop worrying about whether some focus group would find us charismatic sales people for the latest breakfast cereal. Critical mass is reached by individual stances forming a larger pattern over time; and mass movements are hard to orchestrate or control or create. They happen. Contrary to current dogma, not everything is a marketing campaign.
What depresses me about e.g. this excerpt above

This DJ also has a low opinion of activist women. They don’t bathe and have long matted hair in their armpits. In his opinion, ugly and completely unsuitable for social intercourse, much less sexual. I reminded him of the Winter’s annual(?) gorgeous and nearly naked women skating down the Rideau Canal to protest fur.

is that our barfly seems implicitly to agree with the wingnut radio host’s position, i.e. that any woman who doesn’t shave her pits is a non-human whose opinions self-evidently count for nothing. How liberal is that? His counterargument is not, “what a paleosexist creep you are,” but “hey, gorgeous nearly-naked girls can be political activists (and give men a peep show at the same time) therefore it’s OK for women to be activists.” Can we imagine an argument in which we defend, e.g. antiracism by saying, “But hey, good looking white guys can be against lynching, not just those ugly n*gg**s! So it’s OK to be against lynching, really.” Sigh. When the whole premise of the Left — if indeed it has one — is the full humanity of every person and our obligation to respect that humanity in a society of peers, not castes based on trivial phenotype or fashion markers.
At some point if the Left is to have any credibility as a movement of social liberation, egalitarianism, justice and all that Good Stuff(TM) then the Left needs to respond to this kind of taint-baiting with big-hearted solidarity, rather than with shame and a desire to “clean up its act” and sweep the too-visibly dissident under the rug — like some anxious high school girl worried about “having the wrong friends” and not being accepted by the in-crowd. That enforcement of conformity is exactly the root of the authoritarianism that we’re trying to fight, eh? So long as the threat of being called a “n*****lover” or “a fag” or “a wuss,” an “anorak” or a “latte liberal” or a “commie,” or any other such taint-by-association attacks, cause us to get all scared and start worrying about how to fix our image and reaching for our t-shirts that say “I’m Not With Him,” then I hate to say it, but the terrorists (the real ones) win. ‘cos they can always move the goalposts further and further right, until it becomes “communist” to support public education and “hippie” to ride a bicycle and “loony” to critique capitalism at all, even cautiously and tangentially. we can’t win that game. the carrot of respectability will just be moved further and further away… cf the Dem Party’s death spiral into the neocon lalaland.
btw I recommend a read of of Solnit’s essay “Hope in the Dark” for perspective on the difficulty of saying, today, how effective or ineffective political actions are. the effects of our actions are largely incalculable. the fantasy that we can predict and forecast exactly which action will have the most effect or the best effect, can easily lead us into spinning our wheels desperately trying to optimise the unoptimisable instead of doing something right now. so before we stand on our lofty pedestal and proclaim as M has, that e.g. the forest defenders are being counterproductive, hurting their own cause etc, we should wait fifty years and see how history finally played out. many people who were scolded with exactly the same paternalistic tut-tuttery, over the decades, ended up winning their battles or inspiring others to do so. as the Chinese premier once said — in the 70’s iirc — when asked what he thought about the French Revolution, “it’s too early to tell.”
it’s too early to tell. Hiding nothing from the masses our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories. …and hey, don’t worry about the beards 🙂

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 2 2006 23:10 utc | 69

When confronted with a false, or losing (or both) dichotomy as an answer to a question, my typical solution is to change the question. In this case, the battle lines are set, and have been since about 1970. We know what the American “left” stands for: opposing Vietnam/Iraq, supporting abortion, attempting to legislate equality via politics or courts. Economics is limited to maintaining the New Deal.
Those who feel, and have felt most strongly about these things are the effete academics and dirty hippies. Or at least, those are the perceptions. When someone shows up who sounds like they fit the perception of a “leftist” they are automatically tarred with this brush, whether it’s deserved or not. Look at Howard Dean, a centrist governor – how much more respectable is that? – turned into a crazy angry loony left by media perception for being the public opposition to the Iraq War.
The last shift in American politics to bring anything really new to the table was the rise of Christian Right, which is why, apart from social legislation, the “left” has been losing ground ever since. If we want a shift in attitudes in the general population, we either have to figure out how to change the apparent battle lines (which doesn’t work from the “leftist” standpoint) or open up a new front, as it were.

Posted by: Rowan | Oct 2 2006 23:47 utc | 71

How do you politely persuade people that torture is a bad idea?
yes, well, there you have it. when the goalposts have moved that far then it is imho time to stand with Bakunin as “an impossible person” rather than worrying about how to fit in at the cocktail parties of those who are currently possible.
all of which is not an argument for abandoning great swathes of the public — communicating loudly and clearly to as many people as possible is of course essential. but trying to talk down to people, dilute the message, dress up our values in respectability camo to try to slip them past imagined defences, etc. is imho a losing policy. it ain’t how the Right started winning. they know how to shift those goalposts; they were planning to privatise social security and invade Iraq 30 years ago, when both ideas were “loony.”

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 3 2006 0:32 utc | 73

No, DeAnander, this barfly does not agree with the radio personality about his low opinion of activist women.
Your parse of my post clipped the very next sentence of the paragraph – “Sadly, women in synthetic parkas carrying placards wouldn’t rate a photo and maybe a story.”
I thought that conveyed my sense of, well, sadness that women have to be pretty and naked for the media to listen to what they have to say (and then portray them as loonies for the extreme measures they are forced to use to even be heard.)
I was relating to this guy in terms he can relate to while expressing my sadness as above and skewering a media wide stereotype.
If I had responded in the way you did to me as well as calling him a paleosexist creep, the DJ might consider me an effete intellectual and be turned off.
He wouldn’t be likely to listen to what I might have to say about anything after that would he?

Posted by: gmac | Oct 3 2006 0:49 utc | 75

Cutouts and Paper Tigers, and What To Do With Them

I told these small town Democrats that they are already a great American insurgency. They are going up against a Republican media, big GOP money and a blatant bumper-sticker regime that, at first glance, seems robust. Like most insurgencies, the Democrats are widely distributed, decentralized, subject at times to a cacophony of voices and fickle leadership. Like all insurgencies, they hold forth righteous reasons for taking their country back.
Like a native and righteous insurgency, they already have won hearts and minds. They already – by default perhaps – stand for something that resonates overwhelmingly with average Americans. The average Democrat today stands more consistently, and more publicly, for rule of law, anti-federalism, the Bill of Rights, limited government and fiscal responsibility than any registered Republican.
This means they have the silent support of millions of Democrat, Republican, independent and libertarian Americans. This means that it is Democrats who hold the hearts and minds of the country – and whether in November or later, they will defeat the forces that occupy Washington.

I think that Karen Kwiatkowski is speaking to the opposition in general here and not just to the Democrats she was invited to address.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Oct 3 2006 0:58 utc | 77

I was relating to this guy in terms he can relate to
yes I do see that, and I have pursued that same strategy myself on occasion… but how far do we go with this? is it more important to establish solidarity with wingnut radio hosts than with our allies? admittedly “you’re a paleosexist creep” is not the most constructive engagement 🙂 but otoh there are times when someone who is full of s**t needs to be told that they are full of s**t — just like sometimes a friend who is an alcoholic needs to be told to his face that he had a drinking problem… when politely picking our way around without “giving offence” means standing by and tacitly endorsing the other person’s offensiveness, being a passive participant, enabling (ahem) their delusions or prejudices.
it was my impression that the comment that sadly, ordinary women in ordinary winter clothing carrying placards would not make the news, was made in retrospect here to MoA readers, not in realtime to the DJ — but if there was in fact a conversation w/him about how frustrating it is when female protesters have to turn themselves into a girly show to get any media attention, and how this then trivialises their actions in a maddening catch-22, then the conversation with the wingnut DJ was indeed more challenging and imho productive than I thought — and my apologies for misreading the text. but this specific anecdote isn’t all that important, it’s an archetypical interaction and a point of decision that I think every dissident has faced and had to negotiate somehow: how confrontative can/dare I be?
how much can I shut up about “for a greater good” before I erode the greater good that I’m allegedly working for? is direct confrontation ever constructive? if so, when? how do I manage to be nonthreatening to someone who openly hates my friends and allies, without betraying my friends and allies? to what extent am I prepared to “go undercover” or “be in the closet” in order to be a more effective activist? am I really more effective when I’m running under false colours? these are not simple questions. many a party and organisation has drifted far from its core values by pursuing the false-flag or “relate to them in their own terms” strategy; and many a party and organisation has strangled on its own relentless doctrinal purity. failure is clearly possible down either path.
imho at some point in a difficult conversation we pick sides. we choose to identify ourselves with the person whose prejudices we are pandering to, or with the people they are vilifying. a person could say (whether it’s true or not) “Hey, my girlfriend doesn’t shave, you gotta problem wid dat?” or “Ya know, I am just not down with your attitude to women, dude,” or whatever it takes to shake that guy out of his complacent assumptions: that Those People are Inferior and that everyone agrees with him on this.
the DJ guy in the parable is assuming that radical/dissident views can be dismissed because the Wrong Kind of People have them, e.g. untouchables, tainted persons like “ugly” women (and that women’s status as human beings is measured by how fuckable he thinks they are, which is a whole other topic, sheesh). this is a way that the establishment uses the machinery of Taint to marginalise subversive opinions: people who think/say XYZ all have cooties! childish, but it works.
so there are two ways to contest this: one is to say that hey, the Right Kind of People (in terms he can relate to) also have such views — like beautiful women — so he should rethink his assumptions about the views. but another imho more subversive approach is “I’m Spartacus!” — i.e. to put on the yellow star as it were, and say “Whaddya Mean the Wrong Kind of People, that’s my sister/mother/friend/self yer talking about.” and he should rethink his assumptions about the people. “Hey, so I guess that means I have cooties, now what?” it’s a gamble: the other person may just decide that your humanity outweighs their bigotry and forces a rethink, or they may decide that you just declared yourself a nonhuman 🙂
so this can be a dangerous strategy in some circumstances (Ed Abbey memorably wrote, in his heavily fictionalised memoir, about the mad veteran Hayduke who would walk into a redneck bar, get slightly soused, and yell “My name is George Hayduke and I’m a hippie pinko commie fag!”)… but imho, standing with the riffraff and defending the riffraff against the contempt of the “normal” (and those who make it their business to enforce norms, like radio jocks who make selected people/groups the butt of cheapshot jokes to create ingroup bonding among their audience) makes a stronger longterm political strategy than trying to shoehorn or smuggle an inclusive or democratic politics into the exclusionary and contemptuous worldview of e.g. the wingnut talkhost.
I’ve tried both approaches. I’m not sure which “works better” in the long run (cf Solnit ref above, how can we ever know). but I think I prefer solidarity.

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 3 2006 2:01 utc | 79

this is a way that the establishment uses the machinery of Taint to marginalise subversive opinions: people who think/say XYZ all have cooties! childish, but it works.
your so right DeAnander.
and we get served the kool-aid by the right, mixed in the the right proportion for whomever, gentry or pleb.
the democ equivalent is a byob where you gets to sip a little of everything.
this is the best thread, lots of education here.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 3 2006 3:35 utc | 81

theres leftism as a protest movement and theres leftism as an ideological movement. And the success of either draws from different dynamics. Both need each other.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 3 2006 9:38 utc | 83

cinder block. now there’s a memorable new meme. I am sorry gmac that you wasted your time and forbearance on a cinder block 🙁 the lockdown that the US right has on talk radio is, I think, a strong argument for building parallel competitive media rather than trying to engage on the totally controlled turf they have created. hence projects like Air America, etc. — which I don’t find much more listenable, but it is at least a competing POV.
the task of changing hearts and minds is really a conundrum, with a lot of folk wisdom telling us that it can’t be done — “you can lead a horse to water,” etc. and a lot of Straussian control fantasies and Mad Ave telling us it can be done easily, they do it every day.
I try to understand what has changed my own thinking in major issues, how my opinions have altered over the years, and unfortunately the answer comes up consistently as “reading.” by reading books, by reading essays, articles, analysis, numbers, by reading graphs and charts (ones I agree with and disagree with) my opinions evolve over time. but I’m told repeatedly that “most people don’t read.”
but also my mind changes over time through knowing people: the opinions of people we really admire and respect, I think, must inevitably carry weight of some kind. if we end up disagreeing with them we will still end up with more tolerance for their divergent POV than we would if we had only encountered it from strangers or enemies. and likewise there is negative opinion shaping: the enemy of my enemy sometimes looks better to me over time, and the opinions held by real jerks (consistently over years) come to be associated for me with jerkiness. we build up meme clusters that are tightly bound to emotional/associational clusters; but these also shift. it is not so much how to change the minds of individual people that troubles me at this time, as how to shift the playing field of discourse, to rehabilitate ideas and concepts that the wingnut meme-putsch has exiled to Siberia, rendered inherently risible, beyond the pale of serious discourse. ideas like justice, international law, checks and balances, commonwealth, the commons, proportional representation, reciprocal altruism, limits, true cost accounting…
anyway… how to share information and promote what we think is a better way of solving problems and maintaining our human endeavour… it’s a serious issue and at times of crisis (as right now) very urgent and fraught, so we end up squabbling over what is the Most Effective Way. blogistan certainly offers one avenue for uttering our arguments, making our case: the writing or pamphleteering face of activism. but there is imho no substitute for mass action… for mass defiance of the authority of the State, a mass display of our sense that our leaders have lost the mandate of heaven and 8t is time for a major change.

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 3 2006 20:19 utc | 85

I’ll also add to deanander’s fine posts acknowledgment of the problem of the endless differentiations of “politics” found in cyberspace. two recent books: tiziana terranova cyberpolitics and dyer witheford’s cybermarx address this problem by claiming the creation of a whole new mode of production countermanding capitalist exploitation–practices arising out of free interactions and not guided by this or that “theory.” paolo virno, lazarrato, negri, yochai benkler and others argue the same.
I completely disagree. without mass action organized by intellectuals, guided by specific analysis and normative theory, nothing will change at a time when vast and uncomfortable changes are needed.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 3 2006 23:54 utc | 87

We love our useless idiots, slothrop.
Especially when they bring so much knowledge to the table.
We really do.

Posted by: Ms. M | Oct 4 2006 0:05 utc | 89

and this contradiction in monolycus’ views found here in the demand of appearances kept by the “left” in order for it to find success.
again the futile oscillation between discursive postmodern plethora and an outrage of the lack of comportment among the “left” to present themselves favorably to herdman. and of course for monolycus, this last inability conceals class resentiment.
it’s all a jumble of confusion.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 4 2006 0:34 utc | 91

who can deny the intellectual leadership of strauss’s students and the city college cohort?
all we need is a national cable system. and it’s all ours.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 4 2006 1:47 utc | 93

i too am tempted by antiauthoritarianism but understand also i am compelled by internalizing the shibboleth of “democracy” as the end-all goal of everything. it’s always enough the “people” believe they are free and “democratic.” it’s enough, isn’t it?

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 4 2006 1:56 utc | 95

Sloth: I was quoting Orwell. Somewhere else Orwell writes something to the effect of “but others [not the vegan sandal wearers he so dislikes] are not the only socialists, in many places you can find stalwart working class leaders who even the most hidebound tory would have to admire”. Thompson responds “Good man, make him an NCO.” Ah, the Brits obsess about class like Americans obsess about race.
I’m not at all sympathetic to your intellectual leaders. Not only are most leftie intellectuals pretty fucking stupid, but Bakunin was proved correct – that rule of the pedants is the worst tyranny. We can rescue Marx’s analysis by removing the major flaw: the idea that the proles were the rising class. Instead, the capitalists have been displaced by the bureaucrats. Communist, corporatist, whatever. Marx was an avatar of a new class, but he was a clerk, an intellectual, a worker of words, a producer of paper not, as he hoped, a leader for the salt-of-the-earth. The paper wizard class has, in the last 160 years firmly taken power from the swashbuckling capitalists, imposed boards and reporting structures, rationalized workflow, extended the power of the state, turned the universities into science and propaganda factories, systematized propaganda, and learned to “manufacture consent” by a mix of lies and violence as needed. The supposed battle between the victorious capitalists and the remnants of the leftist elite is really just a mopping up operation as one faction of the bureaucracy, one favoring a “guided market” has shattered a different faction. But the easy transition of Soviet nomenkultura into corporatists shows how little difference there is. Power point reigns supreme from the Forbidden City to Wall Street.

Posted by: citizen k | Oct 4 2006 2:53 utc | 97

if I’m callous, it’s because monolycus doesn’t earn his arrogance.
From your mouth to your ears, as they used to say in the old country.

Posted by: citizen k | Oct 4 2006 2:57 utc | 99