I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.
There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Teach us to turn and not to turn.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
really 29 Nov. just made private post cataloging my ggl rdr category-tags for asllvn.
how I read the 2008 campaign ... election.
= posted by m # 5:12 PM (mdlww)
'dlcs' label here bcs it's me articulating my categories, my thinking. categories oh categories, how I am arranging. assessment.
how I read the 2008 campaign ... election.
= posted by m # 5:12 PM (mdlww)
'dlcs' label here bcs it's me articulating my categories, my thinking. categories oh categories, how I am arranging. assessment.
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Right to Remain Silent - By Austin W. Bramwell | The American Conservative, November 03, 2008 Issue | Conservatives don’t need a movement—and the best have no use for one.
That conservatism is in crisis is widely acknowledged. Some say that the movement has forsaken its principles; others that it has been corrupted by power; still others call for ideological renovation. All share the conviction that the crisis calls for a high-minded conversation as to the meaning of conservatism. To the contrary, in my view, the answer to the crisis—if there is a crisis—lies in ending that conversation altogether. huh. ok: bcs shld not be a 'movement.' not be an ideology, a system.
Until recently, ...most simply accepted the lexical understanding of conservatism as resistance to change. Only with the founding of that set of bureaucracies and sources of funding that became known as “conservative” did the debate as to the meaning of conservatism begin. Since then, nearly every treatment of conservatism has aimed at convincing, galvanizing, or scandalizing a movement audience.
Apparent exceptions only prove the rule. Michael Oakeshott, for example, characterized conservatism as a mere disposition—a theory that negates the very possibility of a conservative “movement.” But Oakeshott wrote precisely in reaction to the more ideological understandings of conservatism like those the movement was beginning to develop in America. The conservative movement continues to pay lip service to Oakeshott, but his theory of conservatism, if accepted, would fatally undermine the rationale for having a movement in the first place.
Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement. Consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement’s founding:
-Joseph Schumpeter. Austrian by birth, Schumpeter wrote his famous Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy while a professor at Harvard. It stands out as the greatest (if also the most elliptical) defense of capitalist European civilization ever penned. Movement conservatives often take credit for the (partial) triumph of free-market ideas, but Schumpeter did more than anyone to persuade American leaders to preserve the capitalist system (to say nothing of the sort of semi-feudal, mixed constitution that he favored). pro: capitalism, free markets.
-Jane Jacobs. When Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planners, flush with federal dollars and enamored of modernist designs, were obliterating old neighborhoods in favor of thruways and high-rise apartment complexes. They never bothered to study how communities actually work. Jacobs did. The unplanned order of old buildings, mixed uses, and formal conventions, Jacobs argued, protects people from danger and makes decent lives for them possible. Urban renewal, by contrast, was immiserating its intended beneficiaries by depriving them of the organic features of real neighborhoods. pro: organic unplanned neighborhoods. (?anti: urban planning).
-Tom Wolfe. Radical Chic, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the Me Decade, the Right Stuff: Wolfe invented the very vocabulary for interpreting the carnival of American culture. He has exposed the degeneration of the civil-rights movement into race hustling, the moral one-upsmanship of wealthy liberals, and the vaporous egotism of contemporary religiosity. For every ballyhooed reform, Wolfe has shown the hypocrisy and cruelty beneath. anti: ballyhooed reforms.
-Jacques Barzun. The centegenarian polymath is probably the most civilized man alive. You can infer his politics from his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence. He admires Montaigne, Montesquieu, Walter Bagehot, William James—each a fox who knows many tricks as opposed to a hedgehog who knows one thorough (~totalitizing) trick and, broadly, a skeptic. No one better embodies the proposition that civilization—the “best that has been thought and said by man”—is worth defending. pro: 'The Great Ideas'.
-Noam Chomsky, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker. These men have doomed to oblivion what Pinker calls the “Standard Social Science Model” whereby something called “society” shapes a fictile {Latin fictilis, made of clay, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to mold} human nature however it pleases. ?? On the contrary, while human nature may express itself in an infinite variety of cultural forms, the underlying machinery can achieve only a finite set of ends. ?ie that there is a 'human nature.' The Standard Social Science Model has inspired failed policies from the Gulag to No Child Left Behind, at incalculable human cost. Thanks to these scientists, civilization has a hope of finding a way out.
Hate Noam Chomsky as much as you please. It remains the case that Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar not only revived the study of human nature but provided a model of how complex features of human society could be explained more generally. It instantly discredited behaviorism and has become part of the bedrock of the critique of social engineering. Indeed, Chomsky describes his politics as an attack on social engineering as he perceives it. Without Chomsky’s watershed discovery, conservatives’ belief in human nature would be only a postulate. pro: human nature not fluid. anti: social engineering, behaviorism, 'standard social science model.'
I admit that many will find this list absurd. Chomsky’s anti-American pamphleteering often overshadows his pioneering work in linguistics. Jacobs was arrested protesting the Vietnam War and expatriated to Canada. Wilson is a New Deal liberal, Barzun apolitical, Schumpeter too aloof to be categorized.
Great non-movement conservatives have in common only that they have advanced conservative positions. None has contributed anything to conservatism as an ideological *system*.
Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement. Originalism in constitutional law was developed by Raoul Berger, a Harvard liberal; free-market ideas by academic economists working within the mainstream of their profession; anticommunism by disillusioned leftists, only some of whom (from Chambers and Burnham to the later neoconservatives) went on to form or join the conservative movement; foreign-policy realism by émigré academic Hans Morgenthau. The repertoire of conservative cultural criticism is painfully derivative, which may account for the dreary sarcasm that usually accompanies it.
Perhaps the only ideas for which the movement can take credit are the those of the “Projectarians,” i.e., the hawks affiliated with the Project for the New American Century.
{ newamericancentury.org: A neoconservative organization supporting greater American militarization, challenging hostile governments, advancing democratic & economic freedom. wkp: neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., co-founded in early 1997 as a non-profit educational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal is "to promote American global leadership" as "good for America and good for the world" and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." A strong influence on high-level officials in the administration of George W. Bush, affecting development of military and foreign policies, esp national security and the Iraq War. The PNAC report Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) "was developed by Donald Rumsfeld (Sec of Defense), Dick Cheney (VP), Paul Wolfowitz (Dep Sec of Defense) and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Chief of Staff for VP), and is devoted to matters of 'maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests.'" star wars ... E Weinberger 9/12 }
I am happy to concede these as one of the few examples of an intellectual achievement unique to the conservative *movement*. bcs it's ugly? or just, happy to concede that they have accomplished this ~
Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life, Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement speech*, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind
{* First Principles - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, June 8, 1978: Solzhenitsyn’s June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard was the most controversial public speech he delivered during his twenty-year exile in the West. His remarks on that occasion challenged many of the pieties that were dear to the contemporary intellectual clerisy. Solzhenitsyn pointed out how vulnerable liberal humanism is to cooptation by more radical currents of modern thought. Moderate liberalism gave way to radicalism, radicalism to socialism, and socialism soon found itself powerless before communism’s claim to embody the “full logic of materialistic development.” For Solzhenitsyn, the inherent vulnerability of humanism to “the current which is farthest to the Left” goes some way toward explaining the shameful indulgence by many intellectuals of communism in the twentieth century. Now that Solzhenitsyn’s principled opposition to totalitarianism has been fully vindicated, it is easier to embrace his claim that human freedom needs sturdier foundations than those provided by an “anthropocentric humanism” that refuses to defer to a “Superior Spirit” above Man.}.
That leaves but one rationale for the movement: to preserve conservative ideas in an inhospitable world. No sentiment is more widely shared by movement conservatives than that they are an embattled minority fighting a hateful enemy. Yet none of the elements of movement conservative ideology by itself poses any career hazard. Mickey Kaus {kausfiles hosted by Slate ~ 'neoliberal' ~ endorsed Hilary Clinton} opposes open borders; Nicholas Wade of the New York Times and New Republic contributor Steven Pinker believe in the reality of race; Al Gore is a critic of modernity what is it to be a critic of modernity?; Jewish atheist Nat Hentoff is pro-life; Bill Cosby excoriates black culture; Camille Paglia lambastes feminists; Gregg Easterbrook is a skeptic of environmentalism. cultural criticism ~ critique of 'ballyhooed' reforms. Some movement conservative views, such as support for the free market, are firmly a part of mainstream discourse. Others, such as a fondness for tradition, can be found all over the political spectrum. On close examination, it is difficult to find a movement conservative idea to which mainstream organs of scholarship and opinion are actually closed.
Take a hypothetical young talent with contrarian inclinations. Movement conservatives would counsel him to make his way up their ranks. But suppose he ignores their advice and joins the New York Times—or the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. There, even if he never classifies himself as conservative, he pursues stories that expose the perverse incentives of well-intentioned policies, the human costs of mass immigration, or the reality that, as Steve Sailer puts it, “families matter.” His ability to see the world differently gives him a monopoly on stories that his colleagues cannot or will not spot themselves.
If the climate of opinion ever shifts, it will not that must be a mistake? confusing be thanks to non-movement conservatives working within mainstream establishment institutions. My advice to young conservatives: avoid the movement, eschew its enticements. Above all, ignore debates as to the true meaning of conservatism. After 60 years, the movement has succumbed to bureaucratic inertia and regression toward the mean. Conservative ideas will flourish only after conservatism is forgotten.
was int in this as re supposed 'crisis' of ideology on the right.
but then reading as giving answers to, what is conservatism?
ironic: this purports to be an argument against asking, What is conservatism? and I am reading it to answer that. but: really, it is an argument that conservative ideas should not be part of a movement, an ideological system. so it's not ironic to ask naively, what are the ideas called 'conservative'?
and what is liberalism? or 'liberal' ideas?
what makes someone identify themselves as a conservative or as a liberal, as on the right or on the left. what are the real disagreements btw the two. not really helped here wrt that. all I got from this is that sometimes reforms proposed by the left are not as helpful as appear to intend to be, and may be motivated by egotism or oneupmanship.
my working sense is that it is liberal to want to make world better, to believe government should be responsive to unfairness, poverty, discrimination. & it is conservative to be skeptical of any attempt to improve the world, and to think govt should be modest in aims, that it is necessary to provide infrastructure and national security, and should otherwise avoid impinging on individual freedom.
That conservatism is in crisis is widely acknowledged. Some say that the movement has forsaken its principles; others that it has been corrupted by power; still others call for ideological renovation. All share the conviction that the crisis calls for a high-minded conversation as to the meaning of conservatism. To the contrary, in my view, the answer to the crisis—if there is a crisis—lies in ending that conversation altogether. huh. ok: bcs shld not be a 'movement.' not be an ideology, a system.
Until recently, ...most simply accepted the lexical understanding of conservatism as resistance to change. Only with the founding of that set of bureaucracies and sources of funding that became known as “conservative” did the debate as to the meaning of conservatism begin. Since then, nearly every treatment of conservatism has aimed at convincing, galvanizing, or scandalizing a movement audience.
Apparent exceptions only prove the rule. Michael Oakeshott, for example, characterized conservatism as a mere disposition—a theory that negates the very possibility of a conservative “movement.” But Oakeshott wrote precisely in reaction to the more ideological understandings of conservatism like those the movement was beginning to develop in America. The conservative movement continues to pay lip service to Oakeshott, but his theory of conservatism, if accepted, would fatally undermine the rationale for having a movement in the first place.
Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement. Consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement’s founding:
-Joseph Schumpeter. Austrian by birth, Schumpeter wrote his famous Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy while a professor at Harvard. It stands out as the greatest (if also the most elliptical) defense of capitalist European civilization ever penned. Movement conservatives often take credit for the (partial) triumph of free-market ideas, but Schumpeter did more than anyone to persuade American leaders to preserve the capitalist system (to say nothing of the sort of semi-feudal, mixed constitution that he favored). pro: capitalism, free markets.
-Jane Jacobs. When Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planners, flush with federal dollars and enamored of modernist designs, were obliterating old neighborhoods in favor of thruways and high-rise apartment complexes. They never bothered to study how communities actually work. Jacobs did. The unplanned order of old buildings, mixed uses, and formal conventions, Jacobs argued, protects people from danger and makes decent lives for them possible. Urban renewal, by contrast, was immiserating its intended beneficiaries by depriving them of the organic features of real neighborhoods. pro: organic unplanned neighborhoods. (?anti: urban planning).
-Tom Wolfe. Radical Chic, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the Me Decade, the Right Stuff: Wolfe invented the very vocabulary for interpreting the carnival of American culture. He has exposed the degeneration of the civil-rights movement into race hustling, the moral one-upsmanship of wealthy liberals, and the vaporous egotism of contemporary religiosity. For every ballyhooed reform, Wolfe has shown the hypocrisy and cruelty beneath. anti: ballyhooed reforms.
-Jacques Barzun. The centegenarian polymath is probably the most civilized man alive. You can infer his politics from his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence. He admires Montaigne, Montesquieu, Walter Bagehot, William James—each a fox who knows many tricks as opposed to a hedgehog who knows one thorough (~totalitizing) trick and, broadly, a skeptic. No one better embodies the proposition that civilization—the “best that has been thought and said by man”—is worth defending. pro: 'The Great Ideas'.
-Noam Chomsky, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker. These men have doomed to oblivion what Pinker calls the “Standard Social Science Model” whereby something called “society” shapes a fictile {Latin fictilis, made of clay, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to mold} human nature however it pleases. ?? On the contrary, while human nature may express itself in an infinite variety of cultural forms, the underlying machinery can achieve only a finite set of ends. ?ie that there is a 'human nature.' The Standard Social Science Model has inspired failed policies from the Gulag to No Child Left Behind, at incalculable human cost. Thanks to these scientists, civilization has a hope of finding a way out.
Hate Noam Chomsky as much as you please. It remains the case that Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar not only revived the study of human nature but provided a model of how complex features of human society could be explained more generally. It instantly discredited behaviorism and has become part of the bedrock of the critique of social engineering. Indeed, Chomsky describes his politics as an attack on social engineering as he perceives it. Without Chomsky’s watershed discovery, conservatives’ belief in human nature would be only a postulate. pro: human nature not fluid. anti: social engineering, behaviorism, 'standard social science model.'
I admit that many will find this list absurd. Chomsky’s anti-American pamphleteering often overshadows his pioneering work in linguistics. Jacobs was arrested protesting the Vietnam War and expatriated to Canada. Wilson is a New Deal liberal, Barzun apolitical, Schumpeter too aloof to be categorized.
Great non-movement conservatives have in common only that they have advanced conservative positions. None has contributed anything to conservatism as an ideological *system*.
Take any movement conservative position: the original insights usually came from someone with little initial interest in building a conservative movement. Originalism in constitutional law was developed by Raoul Berger, a Harvard liberal; free-market ideas by academic economists working within the mainstream of their profession; anticommunism by disillusioned leftists, only some of whom (from Chambers and Burnham to the later neoconservatives) went on to form or join the conservative movement; foreign-policy realism by émigré academic Hans Morgenthau. The repertoire of conservative cultural criticism is painfully derivative, which may account for the dreary sarcasm that usually accompanies it.
Perhaps the only ideas for which the movement can take credit are the those of the “Projectarians,” i.e., the hawks affiliated with the Project for the New American Century.
{ newamericancentury.org: A neoconservative organization supporting greater American militarization, challenging hostile governments, advancing democratic & economic freedom. wkp: neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., co-founded in early 1997 as a non-profit educational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal is "to promote American global leadership" as "good for America and good for the world" and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." A strong influence on high-level officials in the administration of George W. Bush, affecting development of military and foreign policies, esp national security and the Iraq War. The PNAC report Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) "was developed by Donald Rumsfeld (Sec of Defense), Dick Cheney (VP), Paul Wolfowitz (Dep Sec of Defense) and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Chief of Staff for VP), and is devoted to matters of 'maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests.'" star wars ... E Weinberger 9/12 }
I am happy to concede these as one of the few examples of an intellectual achievement unique to the conservative *movement*. bcs it's ugly? or just, happy to concede that they have accomplished this ~
Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life, Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement speech*, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind
{* First Principles - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, June 8, 1978: Solzhenitsyn’s June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard was the most controversial public speech he delivered during his twenty-year exile in the West. His remarks on that occasion challenged many of the pieties that were dear to the contemporary intellectual clerisy. Solzhenitsyn pointed out how vulnerable liberal humanism is to cooptation by more radical currents of modern thought. Moderate liberalism gave way to radicalism, radicalism to socialism, and socialism soon found itself powerless before communism’s claim to embody the “full logic of materialistic development.” For Solzhenitsyn, the inherent vulnerability of humanism to “the current which is farthest to the Left” goes some way toward explaining the shameful indulgence by many intellectuals of communism in the twentieth century. Now that Solzhenitsyn’s principled opposition to totalitarianism has been fully vindicated, it is easier to embrace his claim that human freedom needs sturdier foundations than those provided by an “anthropocentric humanism” that refuses to defer to a “Superior Spirit” above Man.}.
That leaves but one rationale for the movement: to preserve conservative ideas in an inhospitable world. No sentiment is more widely shared by movement conservatives than that they are an embattled minority fighting a hateful enemy. Yet none of the elements of movement conservative ideology by itself poses any career hazard. Mickey Kaus {kausfiles hosted by Slate ~ 'neoliberal' ~ endorsed Hilary Clinton} opposes open borders; Nicholas Wade of the New York Times and New Republic contributor Steven Pinker believe in the reality of race; Al Gore is a critic of modernity what is it to be a critic of modernity?; Jewish atheist Nat Hentoff is pro-life; Bill Cosby excoriates black culture; Camille Paglia lambastes feminists; Gregg Easterbrook is a skeptic of environmentalism. cultural criticism ~ critique of 'ballyhooed' reforms. Some movement conservative views, such as support for the free market, are firmly a part of mainstream discourse. Others, such as a fondness for tradition, can be found all over the political spectrum. On close examination, it is difficult to find a movement conservative idea to which mainstream organs of scholarship and opinion are actually closed.
Take a hypothetical young talent with contrarian inclinations. Movement conservatives would counsel him to make his way up their ranks. But suppose he ignores their advice and joins the New York Times—or the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. There, even if he never classifies himself as conservative, he pursues stories that expose the perverse incentives of well-intentioned policies, the human costs of mass immigration, or the reality that, as Steve Sailer puts it, “families matter.” His ability to see the world differently gives him a monopoly on stories that his colleagues cannot or will not spot themselves.
If the climate of opinion ever shifts, it will
was int in this as re supposed 'crisis' of ideology on the right.
but then reading as giving answers to, what is conservatism?
ironic: this purports to be an argument against asking, What is conservatism? and I am reading it to answer that. but: really, it is an argument that conservative ideas should not be part of a movement, an ideological system. so it's not ironic to ask naively, what are the ideas called 'conservative'?
and what is liberalism? or 'liberal' ideas?
what makes someone identify themselves as a conservative or as a liberal, as on the right or on the left. what are the real disagreements btw the two. not really helped here wrt that. all I got from this is that sometimes reforms proposed by the left are not as helpful as appear to intend to be, and may be motivated by egotism or oneupmanship.
my working sense is that it is liberal to want to make world better, to believe government should be responsive to unfairness, poverty, discrimination. & it is conservative to be skeptical of any attempt to improve the world, and to think govt should be modest in aims, that it is necessary to provide infrastructure and national security, and should otherwise avoid impinging on individual freedom.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
"When one chooses, one chooses the world. No alibis."
Salon.com Politics | Pride before the fall
Nov. 8, 2000 | At this writing, there's a good chance that Ralph Nader's self-declared "conscience" vote in Florida will have lubricated young George Bush's way into the White House. The most fatuous president since Warren G. Harding, the most lackadaisically friendly to corporations since Reagan, the least primed for any governing activity besides rolling over for big oil, will come to power with a Green escort. Talk about making a difference.
"Al Gore cost me the election," Nader said this morning at the National Press Club. Cute, the self-righteousness of a sect.
Not long ago he declared, in effect, that even the worst Republicans weren't so bad at all, because they strengthened the opposition. "Heightening the contradictions" was the way this argument was put in the late 1960s, with reckless disregard of the people who would be hurt when those contradictions fell on their backs. "How can you spoil a system spoiled to the core?" Nader asks. Easily.
If indeed Bush is counted in, and a Republican White House does indeed join with a Republican Congress and Republican court system, it will be interesting to watch the rationalizations fly. But moral purists might consider that, if conscience is anything, it demands responsibility. It is fanaticism that washes its hands of results. Indeed, finger-pointing in every direction but home is the way of normal, stale politics. Rabbi Hillel, Dostoevski, Sartre, Gandhi (whom Naderites like to quote in other connections) have all known this central principle: When one chooses, one chooses the world. No alibis.
what does that mean? your choices have consequences? general sense of ~ 'this is not a dress rehearsal.' ~ ? . you have to choose in the world as it is. but doesn't say you choose *in* the world. you choose the world. so: your choices make the world.
why 'alibi'? ~ meaning 'excuse'? but that is not what it means. alibi - “‘elsewhere, at another place’”. so: meaning, I couldn't vote for Gore, I was with Nader. ?
context seems to call for it to mean: one takes responsibility. no rationalizations.
but I don't see how it says that.
anyway I do like the statement. When one chooses, one chooses the world. but I think what I hear in it is not what Todd Gitlin meant, I hear sth about being, affirming, worlding. if you do not have a world, how can you make any choice? that's the feeling fr wh I come at it. worldlessness, the impossibility of preferring anything (other than 'not to' - Bartleby). the world is that without which no choosing. if you choose, you choose the world.
came to this Gitlin article re Nader in 2000 election via:
ggl:"heightening the contradictions"
asllvn, prvs: The Chairman of the American Nazi Party, among other self-proclaimed racists, is voting for Obama. It's called heightening the contradictions - something all good communists and neocons also understand.
nettime: Nader - 'heightening the contradictions'?: For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of 'heightening the contradictions.' It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.
Arlene Goldbard » Blog Archive » Normalizing the Contradictions
One key trope of sixties activism was “heightening the contradictions.” According to this concept, when social contradictions (such as huge accumulations of wealth in the midst of crippling poverty) became extreme enough, people would get fed up and revolt.
?so racists endorsing Obama in hopes that a Pres Obama will lead to increased racism in revolt? but that is not the kind of reason they give in the article asllvn is pointing to. (& what exactly is the *contradiction* being heightened?)
Salon.com Politics | Pride before the fall
Nov. 8, 2000 | At this writing, there's a good chance that Ralph Nader's self-declared "conscience" vote in Florida will have lubricated young George Bush's way into the White House. The most fatuous president since Warren G. Harding, the most lackadaisically friendly to corporations since Reagan, the least primed for any governing activity besides rolling over for big oil, will come to power with a Green escort. Talk about making a difference.
"Al Gore cost me the election," Nader said this morning at the National Press Club. Cute, the self-righteousness of a sect.
Not long ago he declared, in effect, that even the worst Republicans weren't so bad at all, because they strengthened the opposition. "Heightening the contradictions" was the way this argument was put in the late 1960s, with reckless disregard of the people who would be hurt when those contradictions fell on their backs. "How can you spoil a system spoiled to the core?" Nader asks. Easily.
If indeed Bush is counted in, and a Republican White House does indeed join with a Republican Congress and Republican court system, it will be interesting to watch the rationalizations fly. But moral purists might consider that, if conscience is anything, it demands responsibility. It is fanaticism that washes its hands of results. Indeed, finger-pointing in every direction but home is the way of normal, stale politics. Rabbi Hillel, Dostoevski, Sartre, Gandhi (whom Naderites like to quote in other connections) have all known this central principle: When one chooses, one chooses the world. No alibis.
what does that mean? your choices have consequences? general sense of ~ 'this is not a dress rehearsal.' ~ ? . you have to choose in the world as it is. but doesn't say you choose *in* the world. you choose the world. so: your choices make the world.
why 'alibi'? ~ meaning 'excuse'? but that is not what it means. alibi - “‘elsewhere, at another place’”. so: meaning, I couldn't vote for Gore, I was with Nader. ?
context seems to call for it to mean: one takes responsibility. no rationalizations.
but I don't see how it says that.
anyway I do like the statement. When one chooses, one chooses the world. but I think what I hear in it is not what Todd Gitlin meant, I hear sth about being, affirming, worlding. if you do not have a world, how can you make any choice? that's the feeling fr wh I come at it. worldlessness, the impossibility of preferring anything (other than 'not to' - Bartleby). the world is that without which no choosing. if you choose, you choose the world.
came to this Gitlin article re Nader in 2000 election via:
ggl:"heightening the contradictions"
asllvn, prvs: The Chairman of the American Nazi Party, among other self-proclaimed racists, is voting for Obama. It's called heightening the contradictions - something all good communists and neocons also understand.
nettime: Nader - 'heightening the contradictions'?: For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of 'heightening the contradictions.' It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.
Arlene Goldbard » Blog Archive » Normalizing the Contradictions
One key trope of sixties activism was “heightening the contradictions.” According to this concept, when social contradictions (such as huge accumulations of wealth in the midst of crippling poverty) became extreme enough, people would get fed up and revolt.
?so racists endorsing Obama in hopes that a Pres Obama will lead to increased racism in revolt? but that is not the kind of reason they give in the article asllvn is pointing to. (& what exactly is the *contradiction* being heightened?)
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