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The lesson was learned after 2008.
Would you agree, though, that you'd always have fewer victories and gains and greater difficulty organizing from below when you're trying to do that under a less-progressive adminisration than a more-progressive one?
It was much harder, for example, for the black freedom movement to organize and grow under a "centrist" and obsessively anti-Red set of administrations like those of Kennedy and Johnson than it would have been under a president whose values were closer to those of Henry Wallace, for example.
It was much harder under Jimmy Carter than it would have been under Ted Kennedy or Frank Church.
And we both know it will be much harder to be an activist with HRC as president, on any issue(including "social issues"
than it would be under a Sanders or Warren presidency.
Did you notice all the distortions of what Michaels's (and my) positions?
Which is, in short: Diversity and anti-racism are undoubtedly good things that should be supported
by all, but these good things are being used as a sop by certain economic elites to mollify
the masses. As Michaels put it:
N)o culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women."In other words, people who would like to pretend the last year of
Martin Luther King's life never happened. As Bill Moyers so eloquently put it:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/04/03/dr-kings-economic-dream-deferred
...A year before, at Riverside Church in New York, he had spoken out -- eloquently -- against the war in Vietnam. King said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," a position that angered President Lyndon Johnson, many of King's fellow civil rights leaders and influential newspapers. The Washington Post charged that King had, "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people."
With his popularity in decline, an exhausted, stressed and depressed Martin Luther King, Jr., turned his attention to economic injustice. He reminded the country that his March on Washington five years earlier had not been for civil rights alone but "a campaign for jobs and income, because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people and poor people, generally, were confronting." Now, King was building what he called the Poor People's Campaign to confront nationwide inequalities in jobs, pay and housing.
But he had to prove that he could still be an effective leader, and so he came to Memphis, in support of a strike by that city's African-American garbage men. Eleven hundred sanitation workers had walked off the job after two had died in a tragic accident, crushed by a garbage truck's compactor. The garbage men were fed up -- treated with contempt as they performed a filthy and unrewarding job, paid so badly that 40 percent of them were on welfare, called "boy" by white supervisors. Their picket signs were simple and eloquent: "I AM A MAN."...
...This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted our system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity -- its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist.
Response to friendly_iconoclast (Reply #42)
