@ CK MacLeod:
I was listening to Beck today and he was answering the criticism he's been getting since his CPAC speech--petulantly and defensively, but he didn't want to be misunderstood and he implicitly accepted he had gone too far in identifying the two parties. He went to great pains to point out that of course he knows the difference between Jim Demint and Michelle Bachmann on one side, and Pelosi and Reid on the other. So I do know that he listens and modifes his position, even if not with complete candor.
What's the best way to speak about politics today, a way that stays in touch with the play by play of everyday political exchanges while representing the sense that I think a lot of us have that we are teetering on the brink of something and, to quote Lenin, we are going to have to try to be as radical as reality itself, but without routine predictions of imminent apocalypses (which will never look the way we imagine them anyway)? I don't know yet.
As the conversation went on yesterday, I began to notice that nobody was bringing up the thing Beck is most often associated with: "populism." Populism can mean a lot of things, but it becomes demagogic when it is used to project all that is evil, all that is oppressing the "people," onto the "elites"--as if they aren't our elites, through our active or passive consent. And that is where, I suppose, the "cancer" trope comes in--cancer is completely alien, an attack on an innocent victim, driven by no discernable motive other than to grow and devour. Everything that we aren't.
A discussion about how "we, the people" also let this happen (about how the things many hate are bound up with things they wouldn't want to give up) would look very different. To go back to Beck, he also often seems to be ready for such a conversation.
@ CK MacLeod:
I was listening to Beck today and he was answering the criticism he's been getting since his CPAC speech--petulantly and defensively, but he didn't want to be misunderstood and he implicitly accepted he had gone too far in identifying the two parties. He went to great pains to point out that of course he knows the difference between Jim Demint and Michelle Bachmann on one side, and Pelosi and Reid on the other. So I do know that he listens and modifes his position, even if not with complete candor.
What's the best way to speak about politics today, a way that stays in touch with the play by play of everyday political exchanges while representing the sense that I think a lot of us have that we are teetering on the brink of something and, to quote Lenin, we are going to have to try to be as radical as reality itself, but without routine predictions of imminent apocalypses (which will never look the way we imagine them anyway)? I don't know yet.
As the conversation went on yesterday, I began to notice that nobody was bringing up the thing Beck is most often associated with: "populism." Populism can mean a lot of things, but it becomes demagogic when it is used to project all that is evil, all that is oppressing the "people," onto the "elites"--as if they aren't our elites, through our active or passive consent. And that is where, I suppose, the "cancer" trope comes in--cancer is completely alien, an attack on an innocent victim, driven by no discernable motive other than to grow and devour. Everything that we aren't.
A discussion about how "we, the people" also let this happen (about how the things many hate are bound up with things they wouldn't want to give up) would look very different. To go back to Beck, he also often seems to be ready for such a conversation.