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by redstar
Preface.
A couple of weeks back, Jérôme did a couple of diaries on Kos, putative pulse of the on-line American progressive community, which dealt with poverty issues. The first was on folks going hungry in New York City, which I caught too late to commentate, but in reading the comments by supposedly left-wing commentators, I was taken aback by those who thought Jérôme's desire to highlight a poverty issue in the US, instead of positives about the US or similar negatives in France (assuming they exist in any substantial way) was galling. But this was nothing compared to the absolute shitstorm Jérôme kicked up when he wrote an excellent polemical piece on the role of government and the proper place of charity. A large proportion of the comments missed his point entirely, but the insistence by many putatively left commentators on the limited role of government to better people's lives, and the constant subtext that giving to charity was what made people good, while taxes, well, not so much, was almost as surprising to me as the frankly quite vituperative and personal response many felt the need to give Jérôme.
(I initially thought better of writing such an Amero-centric diary or series of diaries, but was invited by Jérôme, so there you are...)
In response to this latter diary, there was a fairly wide-ranging discussion here in the comments section of how it could be that Americans, thinking themselves so progressive and liberal, could miss his point so thoroughly. Bernard Chazelle summed it up nicely
What struck me in the dKos comments (besides the insults, which have the redeeming value of being entertaining) is the lack of any intellectual frame of reference in the American left (ok, I generalize). This got me to thinking about the whys and the wherefores of his last phrase, and quite frankly, re-inforcing my belief that Jérôme is fundamentally correct when he wonders aloud whether most Americans are simply more conservative than the rest of the Western world, a diary which also provoked a fair amount of controversy over in putatively left Kos-land. The thing is, American liberals tend to have an image of their ideological place which is at odds with reality, and whenever this is pointed out, they become quite defensive. A Borrowed Introduction. Now, people have always constructed myths about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They arrange their relationships to others according to their faith, their idea of normal man, et c. Inevitably, these creative ideas, these myths, escape the power of those who ideated them and assume a power of their own. In short order, creators bow down before that which they have created, and the more ingenuous of them attempt to wield such power over other men. Let us go forth and free mankind in all reaches of the world of their superstitions, of their myths about themselves and those dogmas and biases under whose sway they have languished for so many years. One idealist says let us lead, nay, forcibly require, revolts against such myths, preferably in other lands (with the perverse, if by design, effect of reinforcing those in our own). Another counsels that we go forth and teach such superstitious man to exchange his myths about himself and his community for those of the essence of what mankind, our mankind, "truly" is. Finally a third simply says let's knock them senseless until those myths have taken their leave of them. In this way, existing reality collapses, and a new reality takes its place. These innocent and childish fantasies are essentially the animating kernel of Anglo-American foreign policy today, one to which vast majorities of the US public subscribed before the dying and the cost got too close to home. They were not received by an American public with horror and awe, even though the bloody consequences and criminal ruthlessness of it were both advertised (shock and awe) and on display (if but fleetingly, and in a far-off sense of otherworldliness; after all, these superstitious men live in the Antipodes). Rather, they were welcomed by somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Americans. Not all of them were, needless to say, "Bushbots," at least not then, and in fact, a goodly amount of so-called "liberals" also subscribed to the idea of invading Iraq, including most of their Senators and many of their Representatives. "Muscular liberalism" isn't simply a meaningless phrase after all. Similarly, these myths are also the driving force behind Anglo-American trade and economic policy, which seeks to impose a neo-liberal vision of economic relationships, both at home and abroad, which do violence to workers in both North and South. All for the better, we are told by middle-class American apologists for trade deals which undercut peasants in the South and, when those peasants inevitably migrate North to feed their families, undercut workers in the North. Fetch me my "World Is Flat" book by Tom Friedman, there's got to be a chapter on why this is good for everybody". Following sections will discuss some of the underpinnings which form the basis for common ideological threads of those who take themselves, and are taken, as wolves, but in truth are merely bleating sheep. It will show that such bleating is simply an expression of the conceptions the American middle-class has about itself; how those vitriol of such commentators when called upon such bleatings serve only to mirror the wretchedness of the condition of solidarity, of liberty, and egalitarianism in America today, the almost perfect expression of the values of its middle-class. These values are represented by five main mythical themes;
To follow:
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The American Ideology | 132 comments (132 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
The American Ideology | 132 comments (132 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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