General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A shout out to "social issues" [View all]BainsBane
(53,035 posts)I don't hide behind anything, and you don't know the first thing about me or my life. It's pretty hysterical you think I'm a centrist because I suggest that the concerns of the majority of Americans are also economic and not simply social, whereas you assume that economic interests can only be expressed by repeating the words corporate and oligarch thirty times in a day, as though that means anything. The one thing that language signals is people who have only just started to think about income inequality as they have seen their own class interests erode, rather than acknowledging the endemic inequality that has characterized many of our lives. The nation itself was founded on inequality. Yet that some of you only recently started to notice is supposed to erase the life experiences of those of us who have always lived with it.
The provincial little political spectrum of yours based entirely on assessments of one members of political elite of the capitalist state vs. another is so absurd as to be laughable. To pretend that any conception of leftism accommodates such a complete denial of the rights of the majority of the population to voice their concerns and interests shows how your notion of politics is ideologically rudderless and instead based on ego and the conceit of privilege. You are free to pursue your own interest as you see fit, but you are not entitled to negate the rights of others to express their own.
And to imagine that you think that defeating Clinton, O'Malley, or any other Democrat is going to stop outsourcing--something that has been in full force for the past forty years, is just plain delusional. A narrow world view focused only on contests among the political elite has ramifications that go no further than political spoils. There can be no challenge to capitalism and structural inequality by pretending it all hinges on changing one piece for another on capital's chessboard.
You rail about the 1 percent, but you show no more concern about the lives or interests of the majority of Americans than they do. You refuse to even grant that I or anyone else has the right to articulate their own interests. Both you and they think they know what is best for the rest of us, the little people who are supposed to quietly obey our betters. Frankly, I don't much care if the people who deny my rights and interests are worth $500k (the approximate income where the top 1 percent begins) or $150k. The key point is they deny my rights and interests in favor of their own.
Why you think dismissing the basic human rights, civil rights, and economic concerns of the majority Americans does a thing to address the problems of global capitalism, like outsourcing, I can't begin to imagine. As long as you refuse to grant that any of us have any political rights or concerns that matter, you might as well be a banker, because you show no more concern for people like me than they do.