European Tribune - Comments - Ideology of the Anger Left in the USA
It's impossible to understand the destructive role of the "anger left" as represented by Taibbi, Rosenberg, Firedoglake, and others in American politics without applying some class analysis. First, consider the cohesive underlying political message of this group - which can be boiled down to We, the people, have been betrayed by a weak, unqualified Obama who is under the control and inimical influence of a shadowy Rahm Emmanuel and too close to bankers like Ben Bernancke. All you have to do is fill in the ethnicity of the characters, which everyone knows, and you've produced something from the traditional language of the far right.
We, the people, have been betrayed by a weak, unqualified Obama who is under the control and inimical influence of a shadowy Rahm Emmanuel and too close to bankers like Ben Bernancke.
All you have to do is fill in the ethnicity of the characters, which everyone knows, and you've produced something from the traditional language of the far right.
I.e.:
There are just grounds for disappointment Obama's decisions, even acknowledging that he himself is no progressive. The administration's inexplicable adherence to the Bush "security" doctrine is perhaps the most egregious example.
Secondly, from a European perspective, the criticisms of HCR do not even sound particularly "leftist". Indeed, only a very small slice of the European political spectrum - the Economist neolibs - would count the current senate HCR proposal as "decent reform of medical insurance". The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
If that left had been less angry and had limited themselves to intellectual deconstructions of power structures, it's a reasonable bet that the power structures would have remained in place.
In fact it's very much a leftist failing to believe that all you have to do is criticise something with enough mature rationality, and it will magically stop functioning, stunned into irrelevance by the power of a clever and insightful argument.
It doesn't seem to work like that in the real world.
As for the anti-semitism - what? Where?
What are you talking about?
There is plenty of anger amongst the electorate, but in times of danger, people, and especially sheaple, tend to revert to craving a strong traditional leader, like moths to the flame. Real change involves breaking the hold of the financial elite over Washington, redistributing large portions of their ill-gotten gains to the sheaple they have fleeced and de-legitimating the noxious rhetoric that has, by now, been written into the brain structures of at least two generations of voters.
The best hope for accomplishing those goals is to mobilize and direct that anger and despair into a political movement that is capable of accomplishing that change. From a psychological point of view, anger is a road out of depression. The key lies in channeling that anger into constructive actions.
The danger is that violence perceived to originate from political opponents of the existing order plays into the hands of right wing leaders by alarming their followers and recruiting back into their fold loosely affiliated "independents". As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
If Obama had done half as much during his first year as Roosevelt did in his first two months, nobody would be complaining.
Well, except the Teabaggers. But they're insane.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Now that's actually quite an interesting conspiracy theory, as in an entertaining one. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
