This is important not just because of the next war and the danger that certain stupid liberals will fall for it, too, like they did Iraq (if a President Obama, say, wants to pre-emptively bomb Iran, what do you want to bet that every damn fool Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum will endorse it?)…

What this really means is that we need to make big, big cuts in the defense budget. Having an enormous defense establishment creates an irresistible temptation to use it. Madeline Albright’s quote (“What’s the use of having this big military if we can’t use it” or words to that effect) is instructive. Once we get our military scaled back to our actual defense needs, the temptation to do this kind of crap will be significantly reduced.

Not that I disagree with any of this……just wanted to add how awsome I think it would be if WE lived up to OUR OWN social ideals.

This is the potential upside to American Exceptionalism. The idea that “we’re supposed to be setting the example here, people… how about we start behaving properly?”.

Alas, these days it’s a lot more potential than actual.

Sean

Anyway, I should say that I’m *for* liberal internationalism *as Lind defines it*. But my point is that in practice, what’s now known as liberal internationalism is shit and imperialist.

Shit, I say. And imperialist (and a fabuluous way to cheapen the ‘progressive’ brand).

Diff Brad:

See, I think it is important. Yes, millions of Americans view the word ‘Socialism’ as meaning a kind of evil. I know that. Still, the word is also tied up with so many concepts that are so damn important that we will always be at a disadvantage trying to talk about universal health care or protecting the environment.

We will be saying, “We want Universal health care”. And Rush Limbaugh will say to his listeners, “They just want socialism”. And he will be right, actually. Seems to me that to really weaken Rush Limbaugh, or any of his kind, you have to rehabilitate the word Socialism somewhat.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just Old Skool.

http://www.agenceglobal.com/article.asp?id=1293

Well, yes it is. Whether or not people want to own up to that or can even define socialism a meaningful way is not really relevant. There’s an ilk of Christian (that’s a cool phrase) that claims that Christianity is not a religion because Christianity-As-We-Practice-Itâ„¢ is true, but the word “religion” already means something and people routinely apply it to Christianity no matter what they say.

Personally I’m happy to call myself a socialist. What I think of such socialistic policies like Health Care For All, though, is what I think of myself as being before socialist: pragmatic. It’s not that the policy is socialist and therefore I’m for it, but that I think it’s workable and smart and therefore I’d go for it: lo and behold, I manage to fall into the socialist box, probably as some sort of wishy-washy market socialist who’ll be next against the wall once the capitalists are machine-gunned, but there you go.

I dunno. Considering socialist (and other far-leftists) seem to be the only group of people in this country who’ll actually say we deserve health care as a basic fundamental right of humanity and mean it, I’m going to go out on a limb and call universal health care a far-left ideal.

And that it’s called socialism is fucking important. It’s the same reason why we have to point out Gary Ruppert’s tic of calling it the Democrat Party, or why liberalism has been redefined, re-taken, re-redefined, abandoned, and set on fire and urinated upon over the past two decades.

Letting the other side define the debate, and running for new words instead of bulling through is what got the Democrats in trouble, and why the far-left has been terrified out of the country’s narrative.

Well, okay, the far-left got terrified out of this country because they arrested us, deported us, locked us up and beat anyone suspected as affiliated with us to death with sticks, but that’s splitting hairs.

If you ask the general American about shit, avoiding that 28% that seems to think we should be Kazakhstan, you can find that ideals like universal health care are a thing they can get behind, but figure it’s a fruitless goal.

And really, when the Republicans want nothing more than to drown what health care we do have, the Democrats dither about on whether to help drown it or cover their eyes, and every would-be leftist leader is either the same boring technicalist the Democrats churn out every election cycle, or terrified that the McCarthyites and Birch Society *will* kill them, who can blame the American public for being sketchy on how valid a goal it is we’re pushing.

What I think we need to do is tell the academic leftists to fuck off. Like you say, they don’t help the cause one bit while they bicker about whatever the fuck it is they talk about. And we need to figure out ways to protect those left-wing talkers so they can become left-wing politicians so they can become left-wing leaders.

Rebranding lets the enemy of the people define the fight. Fuck that. The people can choose the right way every once in a while, but it’s always going to be an uphill battle, no matter what we call ourselves.

Jillian, I go through that same fight or flight instinctive reaction all the damn time, too. I don’t wanna die in this shit, but this is my country sure as theirs. Fuck, I can trace family on both sides to Revolutionary times. On my mother’s side I have Iroquois blood, probably Mohawk. I was in Manhattan on 9/11, and before, and since. This is my country, in an extremely non-exclusive sense, and I’ve benefited too much from it to give it over to the worst of us. I’m no activist or revolutionary, at least not right this moment, but I’m not getting pushed out.

I’m not sure. See, I think most people in the U.S. are aware of the things the far left offers as being good, important things to the further health of the nation as a whole. What we need (and bear in mind, I’m even worse than a socialist), is strong socialist/far-left leadership. We’ve been burnt so often over the 20th century that it’s been easy to minimalize and ostracize would-be officials, and because of that, the name suffers.

The Republicans are doing the same thing now to the Democratic Party because it worked so gosh-darned well with the Worker’s Party or the Communist Party. And if the problem in the Democrats can be solved by a stronger leadership, the same could work for far-left parties in the U.S. The public responds to emotion and rhetoric and you know we got that shit in spades. The good thing is that we’re mostly on the side of the angels with ours.

This country doesn’t seem to want me, or people like me. Hell, it doesn’t seem to want queers, or pacifists, or dirty fucking hippies, or a whole buncha other people anymore.

I think the worst thing I could hope for America is that it someday gets its wish in that department.

I think the problems are fixable (although what you’ll end up with probably will look greatly different from what Marx imagined), but I also think it’s the work of a lifetime to fix ‘em. I’m working on it – just gotta talk a bunch of other people into working with me.

Come on…..doesn’t reading entire truckloads of nineteenth century materialist philosophy, trying to pick the good bits out from the odd bits, sound like fun to anyone besides me?

This is my dream, GW. I hope it works out that way. My kid plays an on-line game and talks to his co-players on vent. (Aside: we make lots of jokes here at Sadly about WoW-playing wingnuts, but everyone he’s run across seems to range from liberal to hard-core lefty.) When I overhear the folks he’s talking to on vent, like as not they’re speaking English with an accent. Lotta Australians, for some reason.

Also, one positive among the many negatives of outsourcing has been the electronic daily mingling in the corporate world of offices in India with offices in the US. All the companies I’ve worked with in the last five years have offices in India, and some in other countries. For a home town Des Moines Iowa or Spokane WA person to be interacting daily with people in Hyderabad or Pune is not something that would ever conceivably have happened in the past. It’s got to have an effect. We’d get the company emails for festivals like Diwali or Ramadan, so even the folks who never cracked a book after graduation would learn a little cultural info. The companies bring people from India over here for a sort of sabbatical and vice versa. You see women wearing beautiful saris on the streets of downtown Des Moines at lunch time, and dark skinned foreign men in business clothes, not cleaning-crew uniforms, so that too is bound to have a psychological impact.

My dream is that once the whole world is working together, the workers will turn on the overlords who are treating them unjustly, see religion in a comparative way, and understand that all human beings are fundamentally the same: They want a clean, safe place to live and raise their families, and enough food to eat. And that will be the salvation of the world. Then the shrooms wear off. Well, I can dream, can’t I?

Gotta go jump in the shower or I’ll be late to my wild and exciting Legal Research and Writing class. (Actually, I l do like that class because my instructor is an old school intellectual lefty lawyer and poet. The subject matter is dull but the class is not.)

Sign me up for the Wobblie meeting! I’ll bring the rum.