I thought we were already trying to Christianize the Phillipines…we’re assisting Manila in fighting MILF (yes, that’s the real acronym).

A little off-topic point:

U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq – 2,641
U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan – 333

U.S. soldier killed in in Iraq + Afghanistan so far – 2,974
People killed on 9/11 – 2,973

A ghoulish milestome of sorts…

I dunno, Retardo……American racism seems to go to the bone.

Every instance I can think of in our history when Americans had a choice between economic improvement or crapping all over blacks, Americans have tossed the toilet paper overboard and gone to town. The story of American trade unionism would look vasty different today had it not been for the fact that black workers weren’t allowed to join most of ’em. Granges, populist party politics, (the lack of) Southern industrialization, the flip-flopping of Democratic and Republican loyalties over the Civil Rights Act…..it ends up being the same story over and over again, and I’ve never seen any indication that Americans are ready for a change on that score.

And American liberals are a scarily paternalistic bunch. They won’t talk about class now for the same reason they wouldn’t talk about it then – it’s beneath them. And after all – the Lawrence girls all chose to work in textiles! Look what a good life it gave them! I suppose, were I feeling charitable, that I would say that the paternalism is probably rooted in a deep, inexpressable fear that they all have, because on some level they realize that they are but a few misfortunes (or bad choices) away from joining the people they hold in such contempt on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Of course, this theme goes back to the same Gilded Age you’re talking about, too. Ehrenreich’s “Fear of Falling” is not a new idea.

But it’s five in the morning, and I’m not charitable right now at all.

And the biggest irony of all is the fervor with which the modern libs have embraced the term “Progressive”. They certainly are, aren’t they? And hey – that brings us right back to racism again, doesn’t it? Woodrow Wilson was a great Progressive, wasn’t he?

It really is like the runup to WWI all over again. The only enjoyable thing about it is that, being the second time around, it gets to be the farce this time, and who doesn’t like a good farce?

Excellent exposition, Retardo! I would certainly buy your book. And yet… no mention of my favorite, Finley Peter Dunne. *Sigh.* Yeah, it’s his funny-dialect riffs, but STILL… Dunne, with or without Mr. Dooley to front for him, had some of the best stuff on the parochialism of the Anglo-American Great Man outside of Mark Twain. And Dunne had a better eye for urban politics and the “new” American immigrants than Twain ever managed.

It really is like the runup to WWI all over again. The only enjoyable thing about it is that, being the second time around, it gets to be the farce this time, and who doesn’t like a good farce?

Jillian, I wish I had your optimism; I’m just afraid this particular farce may be shuttered even before its grand opening due to the financial ruin of both its backers and its proposed audience…

You make some excellent points about the paternalism, and the parochialism, of the American liberal. I think there’s a common thread running through ‘standard’ American history, where Success has always been imagined as a pretty concrete set of goals theoretically obtainable by any individual. “Only in America”, goes the proverb, “any boy could grow up to be President!” But the real American Exceptionalism is that we’ve gradually managed to expand the definition of “any individual” beyond “Any white English-speaking, Anglo-American male property-holder not otherwise disqualified by his profession of non-standard sexual, religious, or philosophical habits” to gradually include a wider and wider range of Americans.

When this nation was being piecemealed together, Ben Franklin worried that the recent German immigrants, with their disgusting personal habits, stubborn refusal to learn English, and suspect political-religious sympathies would never be properly assimilated. In the mid-1800s, respected scholars still taught that the Irish were a separate (and, of course, lesser) race, possibly a little more humanoid than the Negro but not so anthropologically advanced as the Oriental. James Buchanan may have been our first more-or-less-openly gay president, simply because the MSM of his era had no way to express the extent of his “deviation from the norm” to its white, male, voting readers. Patrick-Buchanan-No-Relation (a man who still believes that having a German-American mother is a status indicator) couldn’t even get serious attention as a presidential candidate because the MSM of our era couldn’t sufficiently disguise the narrowness and the ugliness of his personal definition of the “real, patriotic American voter”.

Popular sympathy for inclusiveness ebbs and flows — not surprisingly, we’re more generous when times are good, and harder of heart when the market is down. But the general trend has always been towards greater inclusiveness. I would argue that Classism is the last great taboo — even more so than racism or sexism. I think that the core problem is that our “inclusiveness” has always had an unspoken assumption that the New American Voter (the immigrant, the African-American, the woman) would become more or less like the original template… the white Anglo-American ‘middle class’ heterosexual male. And the downside of that assumption is the unconscious fear among those already “among the Elect”, as the Pilgrims expressed it, that sharing the bounty of our “shining City upon a Hill” would automatically decrease their own portions. I think we may need a new parable, or paradigm — if we’re going to keep this 250-year experiment going, we need to find a way of thinking about “becoming American” that doesn’t make outsiders feel unwelcome if they don’t conform to our battered image of the perfect WASP Founding Father, but also one that doesn’t make the insiders feel like any new voter’s ‘gain’ has to be a NASCAR Dad’s or Soccer Mom’s ‘loss’.

The reason why the Democrats don’t beat the drums of class war is that liberalism has always been *weak* on those issues. It is the ideology of class collaborators who seek to preserve capitalism but put a human mask on it. Do you think you can fire up the people with the promise of having to degrade themselves to petty state bureaucrats for a welfare check? Revolutionary socialism instead propose something far more attractive, which is workers empowerment and ultimatly self-management. Right now the combativity of the American people is at an all time low, because they have lost the hope that socialism gave them due to the betrayal of the socialist ideal by the Bolsheviks and the subsequent implosion of the Russian bloc. Liberalism is a dead-end. Fascism has unfortunatly imposed itself to most lower middle-class Americans as the sole path to national renewal. The only solution is to build a stronger Left which will attract those masses again, and you can’t do that by promising mild reforms that will barely affect the working class.

It has long been my dream to write a book on the uncanny similarities of the Spanish-American War Era to our own unhappy age of War on Terra.

So do it already!

The river of money into Washington isn’t buying power for the poletariat. At least unitl the chimp took over, Dems and Republicans were looking mighty similar. There was almost no real difference between George HW Bush and BIll Clinton in terms of policy. It was just that Clinton connected better with poor people at a personal level as he sold them out to Walmart.

It has long been my dream to write a book on the uncanny similarities of the Spanish-American War Era to our own unhappy age of War on Terra.

I’d buy it.

I can’t access the rest of the column, but what he quotes from Tom Frank’s column in the Times is just fucking awesome:

Here’s the rest of it:

Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-left’s inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut. But don’t expect liberal leaders in Washington to use those things. They are “New Democrats� now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian stemwinder against “economic royalists.�

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer — that is, when they’re not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos — is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or re-educate ourselves so we will fit in better next time.

This last point was a priority for the Clinton administration. But in “The Disposable American,� a disturbing history of job security, Louis Uchitelle points out that the New Democrats’ emphasis on retraining (as opposed to broader solutions that Old Democrats used to favor) is merely a kinder version of the 19th-century view of unemployment, in which economic dislocation always boils down to the fitness of the unemployed person himself.

Or take the “inevitability� of recent economic changes, a word that the centrist liberals of the Washington school like to pair with “globalization.� We are told to regard the “free-trade� deals that have hammered the working class almost as acts of nature. As the economist Dean Baker points out, however, we could just as easily have crafted “free-trade� agreements that protected manufacturing while exposing professions like law, journalism and even medicine to ruinous foreign competition, losing nothing in quality but saving consumers far more than Nafta did.

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington — a place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation — the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign of the “knowledge workers� seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won’t on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers. Liberalism also needs strong, well-funded institutions fighting the rhetorical battle. Laying out policy objectives is all well and good, but the reason the right has prevailed is its army of journalists and public intellectuals. Moving the economic debate to the right are dozens if not hundreds of well-funded Washington think tanks, lobbying outfits and news media outlets. Pushing the other way are perhaps 10.

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade.

Thomas Frank, a guest columnist, is the author, most recently, of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?’’

I’m out there somewhere, guys. Waiting and ready.

But this time you have to find me.

As a straight man, I’ve been fighting the urge, but I think I’m about ready to admit that I want to have Thomas Frank’s love-child.

First, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Second, his tearing a new asshole for Joe Klein in a column a few months back. And now this. Atrios is on fire? Thomas fucking Frank is on fire.

You go Debs! And he was a hoosier if you can believe that!

Thank you, jayarbee. Loves me some Frank. And God knows it’s been a long time since the last Baffler.

I can believe it. So is Vonnegut. So was Dreiser. So was Tarkington.

Are there any serious organizations or bodies that could function as a Labor/social democratic equivalent of the DLC?

What do folks think of the Progressive Democrats of America? A quick cruise through their site has me wondering: Whither the unions?

Not to mention Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael. Particularly the urbane Porter. From Peru, Ind. And you must pronounce it Peeru. Maybe the fact that Peru was/is a circus town…

There are some very easy ways to court the culture warriors with economic policys:

1) The majority of women who had abortions cited economic reasons–poverty, no health insurance, lack of long-term financial security, etc.–as the primary factor. You could stop probably 40-50% of abortions in this country RIGHT NOW, THIS YEAR, if you support raises in the minimum wage, universal health care, and expanded government support for pregnant women. While Bush and his supporters are wasting valuable time manuevering federal judges into position and waiting for Supreme Court justices to die, millions of women feel forced into abortion because they just can’t afford a child, and millions of unborn children die needlessly. What’s more important to you: “winning the culture war” in the Supreme Court or saving the unborn, hm?

2) Why yes, you are absolutely correct that children are better off when a parent stays home as a full-time caregiver. Isn’t it terrible that most familes cannot afford to live on just one income, and so many mothers are forced back to work within a few weeks of having a new baby? But with wages the lowest they’ve been in decades, medical costs skyrocketing, and housing prices insanely overvalued, most parents both have to work–and work more than 40 hours per week!–just to make ends meet. No wonder our families are in so much danger these days.

3) Most kids who have sex early in their teenage years say they have few if any hope for the future. Teens who anticipate going to college or starting a career after high school delay having sex. Maybe we could invest more money into college programs to encourage teens to stay virgins longer–the “carrot and stick” approach always works better than just “stick”.

New Baffler out any day… okay month… now, RobW…..

The reason why the Democrats don’t beat the drums of class war is that liberalism has always been *weak* on those issues. It is the ideology of class collaborators who seek to preserve capitalism but put a human mask on it. Do you think you can fire up the people with the promise of having to degrade themselves to petty state bureaucrats for a welfare check? Revolutionary socialism instead propose something far more attractive, which is workers empowerment and ultimatly self-management. Right now the combativity of the American people is at an all time low, because they have lost the hope that socialism gave them due to the betrayal of the socialist ideal by the Bolsheviks and the subsequent implosion of the Russian bloc. Liberalism is a dead-end. Fascism has unfortunatly imposed itself to most lower middle-class Americans as the sole path to national renewal. The only solution is to build a stronger Left which will attract those masses again, and you can’t do that by promising mild reforms that will barely affect the working class.

Revolutionary socialism is idle fantasy.

Revolutionary socialism is idle fantasy.

After the implosion of the housing market, thousands of foreclosures throwing families into the streets; after the Chinese start dictating to us on pain of no longer financing our debt; after religious fanatics get restrictive laws passed that criminalize non-conformity to their idea of morality; after the gap between rich and poor becomes a yawning chasm, and the middle class a thing of the past…

Then tell me it’s an idle fantasy.

or to rephrase the original thought — revolutionary socialism is not a practical solution for anything.

Don’t be shtupid, be a shmahty
Come und join zie Republican pahty!

More happily, we’ve also noticed that the Andrew Carnegie role of Conscientious & Appalled Wealthy Activist has also been filled — by one George Soros.

Yeah, but did Carnegie buy himself any doomed, artificially colored revolutions? And where’s Soros’ Hall?

It has long been my dream to write a book on the uncanny similarities of the Spanish-American War Era to our own unhappy age of War on Terra.

Amen. A year or two ago, I got my hands on Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, which contains his more pessimistic views of the human condition. A lot of it was about the Philippine War, about which I’d known rather little prior to that. I was amazed at how closely it tracked, especially when I got to the disturbing part about the “water cure”.

Yea verily, The LORD TEBBITT has spoken, let all who dwell on earth simply acknowledge His Truth as revealed. Do not presume to question, seek evidence, or do any sort of research; your LORD does not do these things, why should you?

Don’t be shtupid, be a shmahty
Come und join zie Republican* pahty!

*Democratic

Tebbit, you seem to be immune to irony.

After having spent a fairly large amount of time and energy devoted to dissing the Sensible Liberal platform, what makes you think that Retardo – or any of us who expressed some amount of agreement with his sentiments – would see “joining the Democratic party” as all that different from “joining the Republican party”?

(Please note I did not say “supporting Democratic candidates” – just “joining the Democratic party”. There’s a difference, you know.)

And I haven’t heard anyone here endorsing “revolutionary socialism”, if for no other reason than the fact that no sensible person wastes time and endangers themselves by endorsing illegal activity in an online format in this day and age.

But when your moderate reform approach manages to produce significant social improvement that lasts more than thirty years or so, do feel free to drop us a line and let us know, ‘mkay?

Like it or not, effective change in this country has only ever come about when people have taken to the streets, defying in varying degrees the laws of the day – even if that defiance has only taken the form of “respectable” actions like the nonviolent civil disobedience of Dr. King and those who stood with him. In fact, it’s even something of a time-honored American tradition – going right back to the days of Daniel Shays.

But you keep telling yourself otherwise if you like. It’s cute, and I haven’t had enough good laughs lately.

Revolutionary socialism is idle fantasy.

NOW they tell me!

After having spent a fairly large amount of time and energy devoted to dissing the Sensible Liberal platform, what makes you think that Retardo – or any of us who expressed some amount of agreement with his sentiments – would see “joining the Democratic partyâ€? as all that different from “joining the Republican partyâ€??

I’m not a very careful reader of this blog, so I don’t have a great familiarity with the subtle intricacies of Retardo’s political thought.

Still, I think there is enough of a difference between the two parties to make the choice significant.

And I haven’t heard anyone here endorsing “revolutionary socialism�, if for no other reason than the fact that no sensible person wastes time and endangers themselves by endorsing illegal activity in an online format in this day and age.

Uh. Read the quote in my first comment.

Like it or not, effective change in this country has only ever come about when people have taken to the streets, defying in varying degrees the laws of the day – even if that defiance has only taken the form of “respectableâ€? actions like the nonviolent civil disobedience of Dr. King and those who stood with him. In fact, it’s even something of a time-honored American tradition – going right back to the days of Daniel Shays.

I’ve got nothing against non-violent protest (or even violent and illegal protest depending on the situation).

[…] For a long time there we were told not to attack the fake centrists because at least they attacked Bush, too. But that position is now untenable because it became obvious that fake centrists only attacked Bush’s means, not his ends. Fake centrist economic schemes, which were and are merely slight variances on the corporate-whoring of wingnut policies, used to only be attacked by lonely cranks like General Glut. Now Duncan Black and Thomas Frank and others attack economic Technocrat ‘Centrism’ on grounds of principle as well as on the obvious point that such policies have lost the working class for the Democrats. Fake centrist foriegn policy schemes, which were and are slight variances on wingnut schemes (’a more responsible imperialism, please! Cut the looting, wingnuts, it’s so crass! But carry on with the war by all means!’), used to only be attacked by lonely cranks like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. Now everyone who’s not an idiot — which is another way of saying anyone not Jonathan Chait or the godawful asshelmets at TNR or the wingnut/glibertarian fuckfaces of the WingNet — has fallen out of love with the Iraq debacle and the intentionally perpetual War on Terra. Fake centrist argumentative techniques, which were and are nothing like those of the wingnuts whom such techniques ultimately served, used to only be attacked by moonbat bloggers and commenters who were rarely if ever cited (unless desparagingly) by the gatekeepers of “Sensible Liberalism” like TAP, Washington Monthly, TNR. Now such former “Sensible Liberals” in those magazines’ employ as Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum are, if belatedly, shrill-as-real-moonbats. […]