Reply #30: What struggle?

[Lexingtonian]

There are lots of people who are against the Iraq occupation, including myself. It simply isn't a 'struggle', in the sense that people like you or me are not actually changing any significant number of minds out there. The change in popular opinion has to do with the failure of the endeavor, not objection to or acknowledgment of the actual problems to the ends or the means.

If you really analyze the problem closely, to American society Iraq represents something more radical than you conceive of it- it's not about the marginal merits of intricate issues of traditional colonial wars. It represents a test of the whole, big, package of political assumptions that could not be questioned by/during Vietnam- and that's why the critics are having so little impact. Nonpartisan Americans are letting the method prove itself via facts or demonstrate its inherent failure(s) and ignoring the verbal arguments and, by inaction, foiling attempts to interfere by the moralizers. The role of the critics is reduced to articulating things, to documenting and explaining the breakdowns there are and are forming. That may make the critics feel powerless, but in the larger picture that isn't important. Important is that the the nonpartisans, having given the Right every chance to make its case, determine that all of the claims, methods, and ends of this kind of endeavor are demonstrated to inherently fail. That is a historical change in the making.

Like Nader, you argue from analogy. Analogy is, as Eliphas Levi famously said, the last word of science and the first word of faith. This is not actually Vietnam, the present is not the 1960's- the society is different, it's less deeply and unifiedly colonialist in its beliefs and its political/socioeconomic castes are less strongly partitioned. Arguably the Republican part of the country lives in roughly that depth of the past, but the rest of us do not, so the rationales and excuses of that time are relevant and irrelevant to a similar degree. Living in the past is not "progressive"- well, maybe it is, to judge from Counterpunch and Nader and ANSWER and the like, including your assertions. It certainly is Left these days, but it is also why the Left is politically roughly as obsolete and lacking in credibility to people who live in the present as the Right is.

I don't disagree with you about political movements taking time and effort, and that the ones of the early parts of the present political era were quite admirable. They rightly aligned themselves according to the caste system of the country and group interests of their times. Your implicit problem is that you and the present Left don't see that these particular groups and castes and the ways they worked, internally as well as externally, no longer form the political units and interest blocs they did forty years ago, or even ten years ago. Look at the 2000, 2002, and 2004 election campaigns and their results closely and you'll see both Parties struggling with this problem- Republicans having an easier version of it to solve. The Left has to come to terms that Modernity is the central issue now and the Industrial Age social order is breaking up. Of course, that would be to admit its very limited relevance in solving economic issues and the problems of its social conservatism, which (to put it kindly) limits its ability to distinguish itself from the Right. The Left has to redefine itself in some substantial way to become a strong movement again.

I really don't know why you overgeneralize and personalize a statement I make about Ralph Nader to yourself- if you are Ralph, you can tell me via PM, I promise you confidentiality- unless, possibly, there's some larger truth about you or your cause I'm inadvertently touching upon.