Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Atrios:
Well Okay Then
The phrases they reach for.
Barbour offered a brief assessment of the Republican National Convention. “While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt,” said Barbour of the RNC keynote speaker, “I thought he did what he was supposed to do.”
The difference between Duncan Black and Karl Rove is that Black was the smart fat kid who made fun of the kool kids who led the majority, but he stayed on the sidelines feeling superior, while Rove walked out into the playground knowing what he wanted to do. And Carville wasn't fat he was just ugly.

The advantage Republicans have over democrats is that they proclaim loudly and simultaneous the two poles of the American paradox: home and hearth and adventuring; stability and instability; family values and creative destruction. They lie about the first but that doesn't matter.
repeats of repeats of repeats of repeats:
"Rilly, I had no idea"
"What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won."

"Perhaps more than an ambiguity, it was an irony of history. The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution."
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Interesting to read one against the other. Anderson refers almost entirely to the hippies, the middle class rebels. Guillebaud obviously has no option but to talk about both students and workers. Anderson puts "black president" and "multiculturalism" as two of the changes, but says nothing about class divisions within what he would call liberalism and the "left".

Guillebaud
It was the strike, not the student revolt, that truly paralyzed the country for three long weeks. The paradox is that these two movements never encountered each other. The students marching toward the factories to “meet the workers” found the doors closed. The unions didn’t want them: the workers found the students disorganized and irresponsible.
And the civil rights movement was the organized rebellion of lower middle class blacks.

Anderson
But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967.

...In that letter from 1814, Jefferson wrote that our tendencies toward selfishness where liberty and our pursuit of happiness lead us require “correctives which are supplied by education” and by “the moralist, the preacher, and legislator.”

On this Independence Day, I’m doing my small preacherly bit.
And I'm going to reread D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.
As democrats or "liberals" have gotten better at admitting their own weakness and moral failures, as they begin to feel more comfortable in their own skins, and with their own money, they've become better politicians.
Continuing from here, commenting on a post bemoaning "Eisenhower Democrats" and repeating the three quotes I use too often.
”After the latest depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories.[sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It’s not like there’s not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it’s just that the other Arab leaders don’t want to cooperate.”

”David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom…”

”You have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.”

The first quote above is Matthew Yglesias. The second is Duncan Black. The third is Brad DeLong.  It interests me that I doubt Rachel Maddow, or Jon Stewart would say anything in public quite as offensive as those three quotes.
All the quotes are available. Use google.

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