Liberalism and despair

[nancylebov]

a rant about liberalism and despair.

While I don't agree that expecting the worst keeps the left from fighting back, I'd be curious about any answers to Wolcott's question of when the left started expecting the worst all the time, and any theories other than the loss of connection to the working class/unionism about what's going on.

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I don't even vaguely agree on this one. This isn't whining over every little setback. This is over the fact that the specific crew that put Bush in office has shown pretty thoroughly their utter contempt for elections and for the Constitution itself, if either one gets in the way of something that they think is more important.

We've talked about this before on the phone: In the 1930s, if you were a Jew in Weimar Germany, you would have been stuck wondering if this was going to be the time that a democracy crashed. You would have had very little solid information to go on. If you were one of the people who jumped up at the first sign of something scary, liquidated what could be for pennies on the dollar to get escape money, and fled across a border to somewhere that might not even be any better in the long run, people could quite reasonably have called you a whiner and a crybaby and a worrywart. Many, many times have people running for election in democracies said or done scary things. Only three or four times or so in all of human history have democracies actually broken down into fascism and internal genocide.

But that one time, you would have been right, and the non-worrywarts would be the ones who were going to die.

I know you read The Handmaid's Tale, right? Remember the chapter where she asks herself when she should have fled the country, what clue should have been the one that tipped her over into panic mode? At every step in that chapter, a perfectly reasonable person could (and did) say that this is a democracy with rule of law, that kind of thing can't happen here. Then, when even a reasonable person would agree it was time to run, it was too late. Fiction, sure, but only vaguely. Atwood made that point over and over again in the press tour for her book: everything in Handmaid's Tale has happened in our lifetime somewhere on Earth, the only fiction was in moving them all to the USA at one time.

What Wolcott is calling hypochondria and so on, I call a large number of people asking themselves in all seriousness, "Was that the clue?" "Is this the time it's going to come to that?" "Should I be running?"

My personal conclusion is that it is already too late. Anybody who has any reason to fear a world in which Bush, Cheney, Aschcroft, Ridge, and/or Wolfowitz has been given absolute extra-judicial power needs to have been across a border already. If you think that there is any chance that a right wing Christian fundamentalist government with unlimited power would do you any harm, it's probably already too late for you. If you want to live and want to make a run for it, you need to have your arrangements in place, not least of which because you absolutely have to be out of the country no later than the end of this month. Do so in a way that will allow you to come back if I'm wrong, but start running, now, because the time when you can count on it working 100% is past.

If you wait until the weeks leading up to the election, let alone after the election, good luck (a) making travel plans, (b) getting exit papers, or even more importantly, (c) finding a country willing to take American political refugees this time.

Heck, if you're planning on waiting until after the next election, you may be waiting for many years. I'm no longer prepared to bet that the next election will even be held. The last "October Surprise" involved both campaigns jockeying to control the timing of the release of American hostages in Iran. I'm worried that the next October Surprise will involve terrorist attacks (real or fake) and imposition of martial law. I knew the day I needed to start my run, and it was over a month ago. I chose at that time to stay, and die, because I hate my life, hate my disabilities and what they cost me, and am perfectly willing to let them kill me.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Note: in the following, "the left" and "the right" will refer to the main body of people associated with each term. There are sleazes on the left and honest persons on the right. But in general.

Not to echo bradhicks but to take a different tack - the left began despairing when they came to realize that the right was willing and able to use any tactic whatsoever to win: screw fairness, screw due process, screw honesty, screw elections, screw the Constitution; win at any cost. The way Karl Rove (a man who learned Murray Chotimer's lessons well and brought his tactics to a new level of evil) assassinated John McCain's character - far worse than the Swifties' assault on Kerry - was a broad hint. McCain's actually knuckling under and supporting Bush after that is a terrifying sign of just how much they can apparently do.

And the left realizes that they can't use the same tactics without becoming the same thing the right has become. The closest thing they can do is something like the "Texans for Truth" campaign, which is a day late and a dollar short to actually influence the election.

And, yes, I do have to echo Brad's question: will they even bother having the election? As long as they feel certain of winning - not only keeping W in the White House, but of having solid majorities in both houses - yes. But if there's any doubt, well, let's not forget that the same lawyers who worked up the justification for torture have been ordered to determine that - I mean "whether" - the elections can be cancelled in the case of a major terror threat; and, oh, look, they've already warned that terrorists are threatening to interfere with the election.

Meanwhile it appears that Diebold's voting machine software was written by a man who spent five years in prison for embezzling money through a backdoor he built into an accounting system.

[sgsguru.livejournal.com]

Angst is what liberals do. They're good at it.

Problem is that liberals believe in rationality, logic, and persuasion. Unfortunately, conservatives believe in emotion, hooplah, and, in all too many cases, violence.

Liberals tend to get upset about other people while conservatives think about themselves. "Children are starving in Africa" is a liberal motivtor. "Satanists are coming to kill you" is a conservative motivator. This is true even if there are any number of pictures of starving children and a total lack of Satanists.

Since about the mid- 1980s, the Scaife- funded right "Mighty Wurlitzer" has been blaming "liberals" for absolutely everything that has ever gone wrong. Their picture of a "liberal" is a composite of the worst features of Hubert Humphry, Eldridge Cleaver, and Jimmy Hoffa. After a while, it gets wearing.

Liberals just can't compete on this level; how do you have a rational debate with someone who doesn't respond to reason?

I think that at least some liberals may be finding the handle; simple issues with immediate consequences presented simply. No talking down. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be an indicator of things to come. Does it "lower the level of discourse"? Only for the liberals. But it uses techniques that non- liberals can understand.