This morning, I tweeted this disturbing and sometimes insightful, but ultimately maddening, guilt-ridden sanctimony dressed up as constructive criticism in  op-ed by Steve Almond in the NYTimes. Wanting to think more about it, the best I could say at the time was this tweet:

RT ‏@Shoq: I've been scolded for saying we mock rather than advance ideas. Still, this a mea culpa from a liberal Fox watcher j.mp/KXyDQR
I shared it with my good friend, Joy-Ann Reid (@theReidReport), Managing Editor at TheGrio.com, and a Miami Herald columnist. As usual, within hours, she'd let loose with blistering critique that captured much of what irked me when I read Almond's piece the first time. You can read her post here. 

On any given day, I agree with almost everything Joy says, and this day was no different, for the most part. But I did have some concerns about dismissing the entirety of Almond's essay too casually, feeling that as is often the case, that all elusive truth may lie somewhere between two poles.  So I wrote this to Joy in response, and felt I'd blog it. Just because I can.

 

Thank you joy,

You have told the other side I've been wrestling with so much better than I could.  But I am still torn because while my reaction this morning was just like yours (and I tweeted about it), after reading it again, I am still plagued by the nagging sense that he (and Karoli) are also more than partly right; that we do give them too all far much attention in a meta sense. While, as you point out, there are damn good reasons do that, it's become such a reactionary passion on the left, that it empowers all the lefty demagogues (those self-flagellating masters of the liberal universe), while generally sucking all the energy from the progressive room. There's just not too much remaining for the political process (which serves the status quo nicely). I see this progressive anger-fatigue every day, and it's really worrying me. I see it worrying others, too. Obama can lose, and lose convincingly. And the Senate may go with him.  We all know this. And I think all the anger-merchandising, so well played by the corporate media (and the liberal and conservative industrial complexes, as well), are to a large degree distracting us from really focusing on shaping messages and getting out that vital progressive congressional and presidential vote, without which, we're probably just doomed.

But what the writer doesn't get right at all (besides the ridiculous title) is that he has no real end game; he never discusses where all that surplus attention that he wants to conserve would go if recovered. He hints at it, but so minimally, that he's implying that just turning the other ear and merely showing up to vote will mitigate the damage that a highly cultivated incivility is now doing to us.  It won't. All the polite rhetorical salon parties he imagines won't make the smallest dent in the Koch/Fox audience axis, and they still vote far more reliably than we do.

No, as you point out, ignoring and negotiating just doesn't work. We have to defund, deflect, or somehow denude their omnipotence; strip it from our politics and culture with a combination of strategies that ignore the more cynical of the noisy megaphones, while pushing back effectively against the most influential of them, denying them social and financial currency where possible In the absence of bigger plans, I am going to keep on with efforts like StopRush, which may yet show that market forces can greatly impact how these influencers really operate on and against all of us.

It's all I can do… for now.

 

Related

 

 

 

 "We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike" (attributed to Adolf Hitler).

 
The above quote gets a lot of traction on the Internet, and I think it's another one of those memes that too few people debunk or even bother to investigate. I've tried, and despite thousands of Internet posts to the contrary, I have never found any real proof that Hitler ever said these particular words. But that doesn't mean they aren't substantially suggestive of what his positions on trade unions were. They are.
 
American conservative propagandists (such as the famously stupid Breitbartian fame whore, Brooks Bayne) frequently try to claim that Hitler, whom in their ignorance they mislabel a "socialist," couldn't possibly have been anti-union, because, to paraphrase their apocryphal idiocy, "everyone knows socialists are a worker's party."  In fact, even really lazy students of history know that the Nazis used the socialist label to sucker workers into thinking they cared about their interests, solely for purposes of using their community organizing outreach apparatus, and intimidate anyone on their membership rosters. The Nazis—and especially their Führer—detested Marxists in general and Communists in particular. And since their power ultimately derived from the rich, slave-labor-loving industrialists (in Germany and the United States), unions were the absolutely last people on their Christmas card list.
 
Hitler suppressed trade unions (along with Communists and Social Democrats) in early 1933. It was a key part of their rise to power. They raided and destroyed offices, liberated printing presses and other hardware and beat or imprisoned members and especially leaders. The SS and their brownshirt stooges rampaged through every trade union office of the Social Democrats, took control of their newspapers and other publications, and seized almost all of their financial assets.  
 
Except for a few placeholder puppets, most real union officials were either killed or removed to the concentration camps. The net effect was to crush any power that the trade unions had so the Nazi's could use the shell of what remained for their own propaganda purposes.
 
But don't take my word for it. Take it from one of the word's foremost historians and a true expert on the Third Reich, who is the source behind my words above:  The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans 
 
History counts. 

It's a little confusing, who wrote what in this post, but I kind of enjoy that tension between the academic analysis of our options, and Sara Robinson's spin on them.  At least I think they are her spin on them.  For me, the takeaways are all toward the end, where she gets to the crux of the matter: do we wait (for or push for) revolution, or nurture an organic evolution toward a new, sustainable economic model. I favor the latter, but I can sure as hell understand the emotions of those who think the former is almost inevitable.  Evolution takes time. We may be running out of that.

Changing the status quo is always a bitch. It just doesn't want to change because we need or want it to. It protects itself, and the people who benefit from it most. The include such people as the Koch brothers, every working hedge fund manager, and the many thousands of rich and aspiring people who work for them and their ilk, directly or indirectly.

All of the above discussions are also being informed by an evolving understanding of how transformative social change happens.

As long as most people assume that market capitalism is sustainable,  they'll focus on reforming it — cleaning it up around the edges, rewriting regulations, making it work in the public interest, and so on. Many Americans, in fact, still hope that this is all it will take– that technology, political reform and market forces, working in some magic combination, will be enough to save us from ourselves.

Robinson then reminds us here that Revolutions are messy, and they have consequences:

Others among us are holding out for a full-on revolution that overthrows the whole system in one massive push, clearing the way for something entirely new. Revolutions are tricky, though: historically, a lot of them have gone sideways when the revolutionaries couldn't hang on through the chaotic aftermath of what they'd wrought. They often get swept away by some other force that's better organized, and thus better equipped to step in and take over. Anything can happen in the wake of a revolution, and all too often, it's not the thing you hoped for.

The alternative ot revolution is evolution. But can people who still think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church really support anything with that word in it?  Wait…do those people even matter? Yeah, they do. At least until we vote in enough sane politicians who marginalize them by no longer pandering to them, as they have for the past 40 years.

Gar Alperovitz offers "evolutionary reconstruction" as a better alternative to either reform or revolution. Visionaries from Gandhi to Buckminster Fuller have agreed with him. This model focuses our change energy on building new parallel institutions that will, in time, supplant the old ones. Don't fight the existing system, this strategy argues. Instead, just sidestep it entirely and create a new one. As the old system collapses under its own decay, yours will gradually fill in the gaps until it becomes the new dominant paradigm.

My favorite part, where Robinson points out that evolution has already worked. It was just evolved by the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons:

America's right wing has used this model very successfully to take control of our culture over the past 40 years. Starting in the 1970s, they invested in a wide range of parallel education systems, media outlets, professional organizations, government watchdog groups, and so on. These groups groomed a new generation of leaders, while also developing the intellectual, policy and cultural basis for the change they wanted to create. As time passed, they took advantage of opportunities to insert people and ideas from these alternative institutions into the mainstream ones. The result was that 90 percent of the conservative revolution took place almost entirely under the radar of most Americans. One day, we simply looked up to find them in charge of everything that mattered.

 Read the entire post

Related

The Rise of the New Economy Movement, Gar Arperovitz