Friday, July 11, 2014

What Do We Want and How Do We Intend to Get There?

One of my pet peeves with the Left is the lack of vision about the world they want to see. Sure, "social justice" and "environmental sanity" are excellent values, but what are the mechanics for achieving this?

Some on the left favour remaining powerless children, petitioning their masters to somehow make these things happen.

Others prefer mindlessly voting for sell-out political parties to legislate these things within a capitalist political economy..

More "radical" types advocate "tearing everything down" (whatever that means) and rebuilding a new world from scratch (with no indication of how this vast task is to be achieved). [What gives me some relief about this is that these dangerous ideas are generally espoused by a tiny group of powerless nobodies with no idea about how laughable/contemptible they appear.]

Rather than grandiose delusions about catastrophic transformations of everything or a mewling "working within the system" I have advocated looking at our existing system and discovering the maximum of what can be achieved with it. In response to stephen harper's criminality, I have called for a "constitutional insurgency" to restore our rights and to restore the limits on his powers. I believe the same thing holds true for the USA. The letter of the law and the letter of the Constitution would end many of the abuses and outrages of the Repugs and Degemorats and their corporate paymasters.

Is it possible that ordinary shlubs like us, both on the left and on the right to work together?  If the right-wing is worried about Liberal corruption and leftists "Stalinism" could we not humour them their delusions in return for getting their assistance in stopping harpercon abuses and exploitation?

Probably not. First of all: politically active US Americans have disgraced themselves by acquiescing to either bush II's or Obama's serial violations of the US Constitution while shrieking hypocritically about the other's crimes. Furthermore, too many people on the left have no idea about the potential of our political system. Again; they either want to remain supplicants and let their masters stay in control or they delude themselves that they know better than the entire history of humanity about how to build successful democratic societies and that our entire system can be cavalierly tossed into the trash heap.

It makes me slightly nauseous just to think of the extent of this incapacity.

4 comments:

Edstock said...

If you didn't care as much as you do, you wouldn't be so pissed-off and depressed and angry.

Change is coming, and there will be surprises. That being said, do not rage about the uninformed and the unconcerned, they are the same as they always have been, lumpen.

We will get rid of Stevie. Then, IMHO, we have to overhaul the Westminster First-Past-the-Post electoral system, so minority popularity cannot result in a majority of seats.

Some people believe the world is six thousand years old, I believe that the North American conservative movement is going to self-destruct. It's a work in progress and every day's outrages just bring us closer.

There can be no long-term social stability when the disparity of wealth is worse than Tsarist Russia. So things will change.

thwap said...

I don't know that we'll ever get electoral reform.

There's a big citizen's group calling for it and they have meeting after meeting, gab-fest after gab-fest, old white guys blathering speeches at the microphone.

They never get around to settling on something, anything and then figuring out how to force politicians who are opposed to it, to actually give us what we want.

greg said...

Obama is the good guy. Come on guys! We don't want the other guy to win. He'll start spying on us and let banks get away with everything. 2008 is the best year yet!!.

Have you seen that Movie "Hot Tub Time Machine." Celine Dion's boat sinks and then she goes to Vegas.....

thwap said...

I don't understand that comment.