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"American Dreamers provides a welcome corrective to this tendency. Perfect for use with undergrads, it is a compact, readable overview of the history of the American left. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement lies in imposing order on an otherwise unruly subject. Its seven chapters do not merely move forward in time, but instead concentrate on the movements that most clearly embodied leftist aspirations at a given moment. In successive chapters, Kazin explains, analyzes and criticizes abolitionism, suffragism, the trade union movement, Populism, socialism, communism and the New Left, concluding with the fragments of a contemporary left represented by such disparate figures as Naomi Klein, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky."
Chris Hedges speaks Chomsky++
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It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running on all our computers and, worse, we didn't realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other way around.
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In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a wholly designed marketplace: self-interested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm — or at the very least, reinforce — the false idea that the laws of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced with gunpowder. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions.
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I could take you through a long list of New Right initiatives – from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush – intended to determine the shape and content of American memory, consciousness, and imagination. But let’s just consider the popular little volume and video – Rediscovering God in America – authored and produced by one of America’s smartest and most prominent conservatives, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Therein, Gingrich, a PhD in History, takes us on a walking tour of Washington DC – a walking tour in which he guides us around the Mall to discuss both the monuments and the figures they memorialize.
David Sirota responds to Nate Silver post on rational v. radical progressives
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If American history teaches anything, it is that the "dangerous" epithet is the last and most banal refuge of those who seek to preserve the status quo. From Joe McCarthy slandering progressives as dangerous communists to George W. Bush saying anti-war activists were dangerous terrorist sympathizers, Estasblishmentarians have been painting their foes as threats to the nation for decades.
response to Nate Silver article on rational v. radical progressives
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This chart can be critiqued at two levels, from within its frame (the outcome-oriented vs. process-oriented pairing seems to be flipped, as can readily be seen by comparing that with the conversation vs. action-oriented pairing) and from outside its frame: Nate naturally takes an abstract analytic approach, whereas I introduced a somewhat similar distinction in terms of historical processes, contrasting the "progressivism" of the post-60s era (which named itself in opposition to the Cold War liberals who brought us Vietnam) with the "classical progressivism" of the early 20th Century, that was a modernizing, rationalizing philosophy that existed in tension with populism,
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This is further complicated by the fact that Nate's so-called "rational progressives" tend to deny that politics is a battle at all. Isn't that, after all, the whole point of Obama's bipartisan crusade? In contrast, I've been going on for quite some time about politics as a battle of ideas--an idea that comes from Gramsci, just the sort that Nate goes on to warn against:
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The first type of progressivism has its philosophical underpinnings in 18th Century, Enlightement-era thought. It believes that politics is a battle of ideas. It further believes that through the use of reason and the exchange of ideas, human society will tend to improve itself through scientific and technological innovation. Hence, it believes in progress, and for this reason lays claim to the term “progressive”. Because of its belief and optimism in the faculties of human reason, I refer to this philosophy as rational progressivism.
Rational progressivism tends to be trusting, within reason, of status quo political and economic institutions -- generally including the institution of capitalism. It tends to trust these institutions because it believes they are a manifestation of progress made by previous generations. -
The second type of progressivism is what I call radical progressivism. It represents, indeed, a much more radical and comprehensive critique of the status quo, which it tends to see as intrinsically corrupt. Its philosophical tradition originates in 19th Century thought -- and specifically, owes a great deal to the Marxist critique of capitalism and the Marxist theory of social change. It also finds inspiration in both the radical movement of the 1960s and the labor and social movements of late 19th and early 20th centuries (from which it borrows the label "progressive").
Radical progressivism is more clearly distinguishable from "conventional" liberalism and would generally be associated with the "far left" -- although on a handful of issues such as free trade, it may find common cause with the "radical" right. Radical progressivism embraces the tradition of populism and frequently adopts a discourse of the virtuous commoner organizing against the corrupt elite.
details on Denis Rancourt, cause celebre in Canada, who was recently fired for giving A+ grades to all his students. Goes into his history of opposing the university to liberate the students from "the most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy the planet"
Radical Teacher is an independent magazine for educational workers at all levels and in every kind of institution. The magazine focuses on critical teaching practice, the political economy of education, and
institutional struggles.
In writing Native Tongue I tried to set out a number of those measures for the reader. The incidents that you mention in your question were examples. There are the legislative methods for subjugation and oppression, as in the two Constitutional changes; there are the medical methods, as in the denial of money for breast reconstruction. Those were far more effective methods-- and far more likely to be permanent methods -- for keeping women down than physical violence could ever be. With physical violence, there comes a day when the victims turn on the oppressors because there's nothing left to lose and nothing could be worse than the status quo; it can take many many years for that to happen, but it always does. The nonviolent methods are quite a different matter, and far more effective; much of the time, the victims don't even notice what's happening.
in list: Radical SF
Patty Hearst caught our attention because she was an innocent and largely naive young woman who was being fought over, in public, by two powerful forces: her parents and “the culture” in its most extreme and violent manifestation.
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