until Sarkozy/Merkel
They didn't emerge out of thin air. They're as much a sign of the times as Bush is. Propaganda and control of information works on Europeans too, as all humans have their emotional weak points. The science of systematically exploiting them was derived early last century, and the public has not developed a powerful counter-measure since.
We used to know that, time to remember again.
My grandparents, from Milwaukee, used to read communist newspapers back in the early 20th century. The US has the same legacy. Please, please, please let go of these nationalist narratives.
By now, the potential of the internet for promoting mass interests should be plainly visible with what daily kos has done. Doesn't that give you some hope?
you are the media you consume.
The Left's enduring problem is positioning itself as being against something.
It needs to be for something to be successful. And that something has to be simple with a near-religious quality to it - something that's so 'obvious' that it appears self-evident and doesn't need to be parsed rationally or explained with lists, references and footnotes.
Oh, and dancing all night. Skennah Kowa
Intellectually, as a culture we've bought into an underlying individualistic/libertarian 'philosophy' built on certain insane ideas about individualism that are reflected in everything from our infrastructure( we're still building suburban sprawl and living in cities like LA with "no there there") to our ideas about taxes (from a social perspective most reasonable individuals understand the necessity of taxes; except, of course, in the U.S. where reasonable talk about taxes went out the window about the same time that Reagan came into office ) to the constant denigration of any mandated 'social' programs or nanny state regulations that we try to reduce and eliminate as rapidly as possible. The fact that disasters --both physical and cultural--are the end result of this so called 'philosophy' is just now beginning to be understood (I hope).
The positive thing you want is the assertion--almost completely ignored or devalued in the US--that a 'we' transcends an 'I', that what makes the community stronger and better able to cope with crisis is also a benefit to the individual; and conversely, what makes the individual able to become strong and rooted is a strong sense of responsibility to the community and vis versa.
I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I suspect years from now the kind of resource wasting, community destroying 'individualism' that's worshipped in the U.S. today will be looked upon with the same kind of anthropological awe that we feel when we gaze at the ancient Mayans who occasionally pierced their penises with threads and practiced ritual sacrifice to obscure gods with strange habits and names; an amazing culture, really, but, in many ways, gross and ultimately, self-defeating.
You are entirely correct to hopee, as I do, that the internet democratisation project of which DailyKos is a significant part will inevitably bring about the creation of a genuine left, hopefully a liberal rather than marxist one, but a left nevertheless. I fondly imagine that Eurotrib may beome part of a similar process within the EU, although that is a longer project.
I usually describe the failure of left politics across the world in terms of the corrosive & distracting effect of Marxism rather than on short-termism, but we all have our opinions. I'm yours is at least as good as mine. keep to the Fen Causeway
