http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004/11/four-more-years-aka-take-that-you-sons.html

http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004/11/four-more-years-aka-take-that-you-sons.html

This is certainly a super sentiment. I am not sure whether I am more disturbed by this:

"If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.

That’s the future of the Democratic Party: providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women."

or this:

"Let’s face a hard truth: this was the bitterest Presidential campaign in living memory. The Democrats and their allies staked everything on the defeat of this President. All of the resources they had accumulated over a generation of struggle were thrown into this battle: and they have failed. Despite all of their tricks, despite all of their lies, the people have rejected them. They mean nothing. They are worth nothing. There’s no point in trying to reach out to them because they won’t be reached out to. We’ve got their teeth clutching the sidewalk and out boot above their head. Now’s the time to curb-stomp the bastards."

nope, no fascism here. Just a joyous celebration of democracy in action. god bless america.

This is really quite scary and it seems to me that, despite all the rhetoric of the neoliberal cohort in the administration, there is a vast number of people in the country who could care less about foriegn policy and are perfectly happy with good old fashioned bigotry as the main motivation behind their electoral outlooks. This oversight seems to be a continuation of the misunderstanding much of the rest of the country has about what is important to all those folks in the red states--and what they are willing to support to get it. Perhaps not explicitly "curb stomping" but certainly its political equivalent.

The Republican party is mostly attempting to be both a forward looking party based on a re-articulation of liberalism (at least where it is convenient) and a conservative party, hell bent on restricting liberty wherever it doesn't fit with their values. Aside from our own organizing, it seems that the best thing that can happen in the next four years is that this deep division, this fundamental internal contradiction, will encounter its own dialectical implosion and the Dems can truly take hold of liberalism as a value (a moral value even) and begin to peel off more of the Republicans that don't want the constitution replaced by the bible (assuming there are some). In the long run, it may be very good that Arnold won in CA because it is only that contingency of Repubs which gives the party its "moderate" appeal--and who have any hope of winning in the next four years.

This is, of course, assuming that American society on the whole doesn't drift any further to the right. This depends on what we should only understand as a hegemonic struggle to keep whatever shred of Enlightenment rationality and traditional liberalism alive as ideologies in themselves. At this point, the left has to understand that all of their beliefs are ultimately founded on those premises. The problems we have with them are almost all based on what we take for granted as "rational" meaning that form of rationality that we inherited from the Enlightenment and is every day being challenged when it doesn't gel with Evangelical interpretations of the bible. In order for a claim that these theocrats are irrational, we must keep the ground we stand on, problematic as it is, logocentric as it is, from being pulled out from under us. Otherwise, we are just party to our own extinction and the next fifty years may very well be a clash of fundamentalisms reminescent of the crusades. I have no doubt which class of society will get the boot first and it isn't the anti-intellectuals.

This is true not only for our own country, but for countries around the world up against their own forms of fundamentalist fascism. As we halt the retrenchment on enlightenment rationality in our own country, we should simultaneously be looking for similar traditions in those that face much more entrenched foes in their own cultures.

Polanyi predicted/observed that the double movement that society would make would be economic in character in response to the ascendency of the free market liberalism. But this attempted defense, he proposed, wasn't really about economics. The free market, in many ways, provided some material benefits in the long run. The protections were there to keep the market from overrunning society and wreaking destruction on established cultures. He considered fascism, isolationism and nationalism to be the final consequences of a scientific brand of economics that couldn't account for labor, land or money as anything more than common commodities. Going off gold was part of the same movement that ultimately produced WWII and the rise of fascism of one form or another in, according to him, many countries around the world in which it is not normally considered, namely, the US where FDR attempted to take complete control over the economy and its social role.

The conjuncture we seem to be at, though mostly very different, seems to have produced a sort of double movement, but this time society doesn't see the economy as the main culprit of the production of cultural and social degradation thus their cures don't include labor rights challenges to the free market system. These ideologies seem too ingrained and reified to be contested on any large scale. On the other hand, religion is a powerful force and has always been able to get people to overlook their material oppression or degradation to find a more visible object of scorn. Perhaps the only difference here is that, I assume, inlike in past mass xenophobia, this "other" doesn't have a readily available visual signifier. Thus part of the fear is that not only does one not understand it or agree with it, but it is difficult to know where it might be lurking (one of the Oklahoma candidates for the senate Tom Coburn was quoted as saying: lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”) This kind of fear-mongering is hard to understand for those of us who aren't afraid. But if it is seen by evangelicals (who, incedentally, are only as common in the red states as they aren't in the blue ones which is to say that they are just present in opposite proportions rather than monolithic--this consideration is more to show that I am at least trying not to make too many generalizations) as the main threat, a sort of metonym or synecdoche or good old fashioned scapegoat for the problem they might have otherwise. Thus if there is a double movement in this context, it is inspired not to change the economic policies but to protect itself from what is perceived as the gathering threat which cannot be overlooked. And, more importantly, the threat is ultimately something that is mostly unknown as opposed to mostly reified as a way of life.

This would be an important corrective to Polanyi and somewhat expose the way that, although he is certainly critical of Marxism, his outlook is still heavily influenced by that set of assumptions. The double movement thesis may certainly be true, but the character of the double movement is very much influenced by the available ideologies of the time. The nineteenth century was not only the water that marxism swam in, as foucault said, but its powerful presence in the water at the time affected the water itself. Or, in less moronoic, metaphoric terms, it was a powerful ideology in that context which meant that, when people were looking for some sort of answer to helping their social and cultural envoronment, it was readily avialable. To update that theory for today, the dominance of evangelical, fundamentalist religion in these social environments make it a logical answer to altering their reality--or halting what is perceived to be a cultural degradation. It should also be noted that this is almost the identical process that has taken place in contexts where radical islam has taken hold. this is not just about identity or its disintegration. it is about a fundamental understanding of the world and a process of gathering social legitimacy that enlightenment rationality has all but abandoned simply because it assumed it had won. Though the latter assumption was powerful for a while and postcolonial, postmodern, and poststructural critics find themselves in rare agreement with its oversights and atrocities, scrapping it altogether without something built up in its place could very well bring us back to a world where the arguments are more akin to the dark ages--only with the scientific advances of the enlightenment (i.e. nukes) to help move things along.

So there is some rambling thoughts on that...the last point I would like to remember is that this must be something that we understand in a very global sense because in the same way that Islam is helping to define the middle east, evangelical religion is a powerful force in latin america. the results of that coalition could be quite devastating.