The year is 2036. Packs of feral dogs roam the streets of Denver, scouring the destitute downtown for their next meal: probably some poor vagrant bastard, if Those Who Dwell Below haven't beat them to it. A lone scream in the distance pierces the eery silence.
"What happened here?" a young girl asks her father, scanning the hellscape. "Where did all the people go?"
Nothing.
The father turns a dial on the hovercraft, appearing to have not heard the question, his face expressionless. As he brings the vessel to a stop, he takes a deep breath, sighing as he wipes the sweat from his brow. How to explain?
"They legalized marijuana," he says flatly, pressing his temples. "Reefer, Annie. The bloody fools!"
It was the victory of a broad based economic populism that recognized traditional interest group politics as a valid but secondary feature....which is what folks have been saying for, shit, since Clinton's last term, would be necessary for a true version of left politics to come to power in the United States.
There is such a thing as being able to reach out to voters who might not have been previously supportive. This whole "demographics, demographics, demographics" theme misses the point, which is that people don't automatically vote for a party or for and ideology because of their demographic features, they vote for it because they feel it represents them and their interests.....and if a party can re-engineer things to appeal to an overlooked demographic without alienating the rest, they can do pretty well. It's just what others have called the "poverty" (kind of the wrong term here) or "paucity" of thought that people in the mainstream have about what the fundamental concepts of politics are about that limit them to thinking that conventional liberalism, like we've seen in the last sixty years, and conservatism, are the only options.
Which was very simple: appealing to economic populism, thereby taking the focus off of race, and certainly shirking the very stereotyped and inaccurate opinion of folks that people on the Left are just concerned with identity politics.
From Sinfest. Talking against pornography in any way whatsoever is a direct attack against the liberal mainstream. When I posted my entry against male entitlement, which only mentioned pornography once as an aside, all the replies I got from the … Continue reading →
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And that's a shame because the actual change that is giving Obama the election is a fundamental shift in ideology that's happened over the last four years in response to the economic crisis. But, these folks are so invested in the tired ideas that got them their jobs that actual social change and current history is off their radar.
Just saying. Slow, slurred.
More like watching paint dry and pointing out some interesting ways it evaporates every now and again.
