It looks like once again Glenn Smith and I are thinking about the same kinds of things.

Poorly served, indeed. And I’m still trying to figure out why. And how did a minority of wingnuts take over the country? Thanks for the post.

When reaching for “power at any cost” the seekers of power need only to agree anon themselves that power is their goal. This includes the hedge fund managers, and the 1%, who have more money than they can possibly use, as their goal is not now enrichment, but power.

Everything else is an obstacle.

Accepted meanings of words and phrases, established scientific theories, and even a civil and stable society.

They want no debate. They only have self-interest and greed. They care nothing for facts and “general welfare,” and will sacrifice everything for their goals.

Why are you surprised at this behavior? Your essay, while correct, reflects but a symptom of this never-ending grab.

Spot on. I’m tired of people redefining words or parsing mine to indicate that I’m saying something I totally am not. And when I object, I’m obviously too stupid to know what I’m talking about, therefore I should just shut up and let the wise people formulate my marching orders. This is exactly the kind of thing that drove me out of the Republican party and it’s been happening on the left more and more often. I can remember the early history of blogging, when without exception, every site, every group, no matter how fine or noble the cause, degenerated into cliques with a few of the in folks deciding what was best and then instructing the rest of us poor dimwits what we should be doing. This happened really fast at the TAVA, (Transgendered American Veterans Association). A small group of ex officers decided that they knew what was best and would make all decisions, (input from other member not welcome, thank you), and if you dared speak out against that system, it was made clear you didn’t have to be part of the community. Just pay your dues, shut up and wave signs when and where we tell you! This election has been chock full of people suggesting that I can’t be trusted to make an informed choice, (unless that choice is the one they would make of course), and it’s caused me to seriously consider leaving this blog and never looking back, similar to how I left Americablog. I don’t care how “educated” somebody is or how wealthy or how connected. None of that gives anyone the right to dictate my vote, my behavior or my lifestyle. I have no use for intellectuals who spend their time pretending to be oh, so superior to those of us who didn’t have rich parents and had to go to work instead of to college right out of high school. Very few of them would have survived the circumstances of my life if put into it, much less thrived. I don’t want to be talked down to by people with fancy degrees unless they also hold a Phi Beta Cappa in the school of hard knocks. In my opinion, what happened to the Occupy movement are exactly these fake intellectuals who decided the movement needed leadership and who better than them to provide it? Then the retreated from the unwashed occupiers in order to have some peace and quiet to hammer out an agenda that they would then impose on the people who began to occupy. Ironic that a bunch of unelected, largely uninvolved people would take over an organic demonstration for their own purposes of railing against right wing, monied intellectuals.

In 1963, Clark Kerr, the first chancellor of the University of California system wrote The Uses of the University calling for tying the university closer to government and corporations. Across the country, most prominent universities already were doing that. That began the process of making university departments and universities as a whole places of safe ideas. And the post-1960s trend toward dumbing down the media and moving to more conservative points of view (Powell memo or not) meant that the media’s affection for public liberal intellectuals disappeared. Indeed, its affection for any intellectuals disappeared, including the overly pretentious William F. Buckley, probably the last of his breed. By the time Buckley finally left the stage, Daniel Patrick Monyihan proved the uselessness of the liberal side of the universe of public intellectuals.

Any worthwhile liberal intellectual now has no source of reliable income even as an independent scholar. The consolidation of book publishing and the rise of the internet has made independent intellectual production that much harder. Meanwhile those academics who can operate out of the established institutions of higher education have succumbed to overrating their own importance and not being willing to deal with lesser mortals.

For all the deconstructionism, what has not been said is that no matter how you socially create reality to pretend otherwise, it still is going to pop you on the head. There is a truth beyond social construction of perceptions and ideas.

Clearly, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty are to blame for the state of American politics. If only a Kantian perspective still reigned supreme, the sewer of public rhetoric would not be clogged with Republican cant. You need to get beyond the idea that humans are rational creatures capable of voting with economic self-interest as a priority. They are not. These philosophical and literary approaches are meant to expand the empathy of readers and help them to identify with those they might otherwise ignore (when categorized in the “normal” binary fashion.) That these tools can be used by others for their own purposes (rightwing-generated confusion, skepticism of facts, promotion of lies) doesn’t make them any less double-edged than scientific advances, which in the wrong hands sometimes create enormous problems.

Sophistry, not deconstruction. There’s nothing postmodern about old-fashioned sophistry.

Blame teevee if anything.

Republicans don’t believe Nate Silver is lying. We think he may be making a mistake as a result of some faulty assumptions built into his otherwise admirable model. He assumes turnouts that look like 2008 rather than 2010. 2008 seems like a good starting point to some because it was a presidential election year with high turnout, but 2010 seems like a good starting point to others because it captured the country’s unhappiness with the recent trends. If using a 2008 model is a mistake, it’s highly correlated among many polls. If the D+8 or D+7 or even D+3 assumption turns out to be mistaken, then taking the average of a bunch of polls all containing the same mistake will not match the reality on election day.

The cleverest model is still subject to GIGO. Even without the problem of the turnout assumptions, there’s the growing problem of how few voters are reached by pollsters — what used to be a 1-in-3 participation rate has fallen to something more like 1-in-9. What’s more, there’s a big disparity among pollsters in how tightly they screen for likely voters. Some simply ask if a respondent is likely to vote. Others probe deeper and ask whether he voted in the last two elections or even whether he knows the specific location of his polling place. That’s more expensive, because you have to call more people if you’re going to screen out more responses, so not all pollsters bother. This time around, the pattern that emerges is that polls with tighter screens tend to show a stronger edge for Romney. It’s not a slam-dunk, but it’s food for thought.

Someone certainly is in error, and we’ll see soon enough who it is.

George Gilder & Bruce K. Chapman, 1966, The Party That Lost Its Head.

“With amoral cowards like John Yoo in charge, the word “waterboarding” was deconstructed and shown not to be an outrage upon human dignity. ”

What has John Yoo been in charge of these past three years when not a single soul was prosecuted for waterboarding people? Don’t just look at one side of the aisle.

Silver makes no assumptions about turnout. He is making a model based on polling results and the likely voter model excludes people who don’t say they are “definitely” going to vote. This is why the registered voter model is usually more accurate. That one does make assumptions and from the responses, extrapolates what percentage of registered voters will show up.

And yes. Many Republicans have claimed that Silver is everything from liberally biased, to lying, to too effeminate to be correct and denying it is pointless.

Thank you. Not to mention that waterboarding, while not wonderful, is not as permanent as drone murder..

I just read somewhere that politics today is more about tribalism than issues. I was using the team sports analogy, but I think tribalism may be a better one.

If I hear one more Democrat complaining about Mourdock with mentioning that his Democratic opponent, Donnelly, is almost as bad, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

“I have my set of words and you have yours. When we mean the same things, we can reason together to a conclusion. But suppose there are other people with other meanings for those words. They talk to each other and reach a different outcome. How can the two groups work together? They do not share a common language, and each distrusts the meanings assigned to the words of the other. Worse yet, the deconstruction crowd raises issues about the stability of words used to describe facts, so that even facts are subject to debate.”

I am reminded of Chomsky’s assertion that homo sapiens may never have developed language but for the need/desire to deceive.

Speaking of words not meaning the same thing to everyone, what on earth is Larry Summer doing in an essay about liberal intellectuals?

There are Democrats, there are liberals, there are DLCers and other neoliberals.

Too often, all or most of those words are used as though they all mean the same thing. They don’t.

I follow you here. But I hope you are wrong about Occupy or that they can work through it. Much of the movement is decentralized and that should help.

I am one who became disaffected by liberals. I always liked what I thought were core ideas but the people behind it simply seemed odd to me. The conservative Buckley always seemed an insufferable snob. So too Moynihan.

I worked in a union in my youth, and I never saw a lot of love between liberals and working people. I’m still not sure the two mix well.

After a careful read of this superb analysis, I only have time to skim the comments.

Masaccio you speak truth. In fact it was seeing this beginning to happen in the 70s, give or take I was driven to the Republican Party for some time. Then it became obvious I had to decide which idiocy to choose. At least grass roots Democrats are a lot nicer to be around.

But before we lash ourselves bloodless let’s recall that in less than a decade 3 of our greatest liberal political leaders were assassinated. (No I don’t claim conspiracy, but we lost them anyway) That is a lot to lose from a movement.

In answer to Glenn’s proposition. I have no doubt that the right wing nuts have invaded and won Buchanan’s culture war.

Nice article by Tom Frank.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/03/tom_frank_obamas_made_left_futile_and_irrelevant/?source=newsletter

That these tools can be used by others for their own purposes (rightwing-generated confusion, skepticism of facts, promotion of lies) doesn’t make them any less double-edged than scientific advances, which in the wrong hands sometimes create enormous problems.

Well said, jeer9. I don’t usually disagree with Masaccio, but this post reminds of the absurd reductions of Republicans where all Muslims are suddenly equated to terrorists. I have my own extreme reductionist responses, but I’ve been learning to think more critically about them. My current problem is with the notion of hope versus no hope versus what I consider to be reality (fact). Anyway, I think it’s wise to refrain from pigeonholing entire groups or ideas, particularly ones that are complicated and difficult to understand.

You might be surprised when I say that I doubt that most people who label themselves liberal or progressive or socialist intellectuals believe in a strongly democratic form of government. At least not if they are `professional,` intellectuals.

In the 15 or 20 years that I have been actively educating people about our U.S. political system. I have never met anyone that identified themselves with those terms who volunteered to educate any and all U.S. citizens about our political system. I have worked with people that self identified as Libertarian (1), Anarchist (1), Socialist manual laborers (2), A Catholic (1), a Quaker(1), and one not quite classifiable Socialist party member that worked as a manager at a Savings and Loan and also had a business school education!

They helped with time, physical effort, and sometimes money. But not one person that self-identified as liberal, progressive, or socialist and that were also professional intellectuals. By definition a professional intellectual makes money from his intellectual knowledge and skills. College students are by definition professional intellectual wannabees.

My own view is that these labels represent just as much a narrow class interest as the very wealthy. They just try harder to create a false image.

The real embarrassment is that since our political system seems to reward emotional, misleading, or false rhetoric, to a greater extent than many other nations – such intellectual talking heads have a lower reputation than the town drunk.

Elections Without Consequences My Reason #1 reference article
`U.S. Political Parties are `unique` – by LAW!
-> http://i-voter.tripod.com/US_PoliticalParties.html

Elections Without Consequences My Reason #2 -> reference article Incumbent Power & `Our National Committees`
-> http://i-voter.tripod.com/NationalCommittees.html

Elections WITH Consequences – Reason #1 -> reference article
`Don`t waste our vote!`
-> http://i-voter.tripod.com/Platforms.html

During the anti war (Vietnam) protests in a midwest university we had a pretty decent bunch of people. They got eliminated one by one, legally or otherwise.
When my turn came a bit later – what had been public money for higher education totally dried up and the corporations took over financing research – and we know how that benefits them, not the public.
So looking for knowledgeable intellectuals in the university setting must be done by historians now.

Book Salon up with Matt Kennard’s Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror hosted by Daryl Johnson

There’s a left in the United States? That’s news to the rest of the world.

To say that because some hyperbolic Republicans are making irrational criticisms of Nate Silver’s methods that therefore there cannot be any rational criticism of his weighting modules and his confirmation bias seems to me to be every bit as much sophistry as the article otherwise criticizes. Nate gets input from the Obama campaign on their polling numbers; that’s just a fact. He chooses which polls he thinks are more relevant than other polls. He makes an assumption that the turn out to re-elect a President under whom personal wealth has plummeted will be equivalent to the turnout to elect a first-of-his-kind, history-making, “I have never been so proud to be an American” semi-black Republican banker agent.

To claim that Nate’s work is pure science and anyone who disagrees with his conclusions has left reality behind is nothing more than invective, pure and simple. It’s right up there with Ass-bot (aka donkeytale) and his like claiming that anyone who supports a third party is a racist.

And if you’re going to argue with Josh Jordan’s thesis that Silver’s model is flawed, you might do better to actually link to Jordan’s article at National Review Online, rather than T Borg making fun of Mike Flynn because Flynn quotes Jordan and Flynn works for Breitbart. In other words, somebody whom T Borg doesn’t consider serious promoted Jordan’s work, therefore Jordan’s work is not to be taken seriously. I’m pretty sure everyone can see the hole in that “logic”.

Honestly, I’m not really sure why Nate is modeling the turnout numbers on 2008, rather than an average of the last 4 or so Presidential elections, or elections featuring an incumbent President seeking re-election (2004, 1996, 1992, 1984) or whatever). To say that the turnout numbers should be based solely on the previous Presidential election seems very thin, to say the least. I would guess that a graph of turnout over time would display some significant variations from quadrennium to quadrennium. Just a thought.

What to you is a “strongly” democratic form of government, as opposed to what we have now, which is democratic in name only?

What form of government would you suggest?

*raises hand*

I know what you mean. The Mayor of Boston, the most left city in what is supposed to be the most left state in the U.S. is a neoliberal, though he was probably more of a populist twenty years ago than he is now.

The Democratic Party has systematically converted liberals, or done its best to root them out.

I have a wonderful, insightful book published in 1993, “Who Killed Homer?” by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. Just to quote from the overleaf:

” The failure of today’s Classicists has meant that formal study of the origins of Western Culture is disappearing from American life at precisely the time when it is most needed to explain, guide, and warn the public about both the wonders and dangers of our own culture.”

These two scholars have more biting criticism for the ‘classical left’ as follows: “…For the left to wallow in their [the classical right's] material world, all the while advocating (in theory only) its dismantlement, is the worst hypocrisy — and entirely at odds with Greek wisdom. ” [My bold]

I actually think I was seeing the beginnings of this back in l962, Talking Stick, my senior year at college close to Washington, D.C. Then, the think tanks were just starting between my college and political folk – it seemed a great idea to have seminar discussions led by our professors for government wheelers and dealers. What could be wrong with that? It was an entirely new thing then, and a new source of revenue for a small liberal arts college whose faculty were at an extremely low salary when I was there. The delusion was, in those early days, that we could influence them – not that they would ultimately corrupt our way of being. But the latter is what seems to have happened.

I’ve been professionally involved in academic life for more than forty years, and I vacillate between Massacio’s views and something more benign. I think a big part of the problem is that most academics aren’t all that smart. They are often clever, which is not the same thing. The University forces them to publish when they don’t have anything to say. They may be excellent teachers, but they are unoriginal thinkers. This is one reason why there is so much cant. But there is truth in the point that our understandings are in large measure socially constructed. None of us invented the wheel; we got it from somebody else, and the same is true of what we think we know.

The question has always been how to construct a curriculum that can give people the tools to learn by themselves. The credentialism of college education is what is killing it. There is resistance to a core that might smack to much as ideology. We don’t want William Bennett and his like telling us what we should read and think.

@jeer9 and VMT, please note that I point out the value of these theories twice.

The problem I see is that there is no leftist academci criticism of capitalism. That entire thrust of thought is gone. Further, it isn’t just the Repubs who manipulate poststructuralism and deconstruction.

My view is that there is no theory out there to take the place of capitalism, or even to insist that its contradictions be expxosed. Instead, every meeting of progressives is haunted by the need to chew over every word in a a futile search for absolute truth.

In fact my views are based in large part on Achieving Our Country and Philosophy and Social Hope. Rorty offers a way out of this whole theoretical morass: democracy and more democracy. Rorty was a Red Baby, and believes deeply in the possibility of rational decision-making through Democracy. So do I.

You may have noticed my brief mention of Existentialism. In addition to Rorty, I am deeply moved by Albert Camus’ The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

I absolutely agree that the goal is to enable people to teach themselves, and to learn enough to teach others in return. I owe Notre Dame a great deal, because my teachers taught me that I could learn by myself if I was willing to admit when I needed help to understand fully.

I thought that was the point of Occupy: that we can all learn, and thus we can all participate in democracy, in the struggle for meaning, understanding, and right action.

I too am involved in academics (political economy), my own take is that the uselessness of many liberals in academics has to do a lot with their own background, my father was a truck driver and yet I have never met anyone else whose background is working class- the overwhelming majority of the population. Many of them are the sons/daughters of other middle-class professionals who only interact with workers indirectly when they go to the gas station etc., and their views reflect those backgrounds. There was a post on here about the uselessness of centrism yesterday that could apply to all he middle class types I know, conservative technocrats (in political science almost all are right of center pluralists) who think the system would work just fine if the poor weren’t so lazy and organized themselves better.

Yes it may well have been the early sixties for me too as I think about it now. And yes we have succumbed, rather than stand firm and transform.

The problem I see is that there is no leftist academic criticism of capitalism. That entire thrust of thought is gone.

What always impresses me when I read accounts and memoirs of the well-known 20th-century intellectuals is their need of patronage, usually from publishers or academic institutions. They sometimes didn’t eat (during and after the several wars they often argued and wrote about). They could well write critiques of capitalism from their own living conditions. Their texts served the academic intellectuals who also lived through the same times, but who were fortunate to have patronage and jobs.

Yet they weren’t financially well off. They didn’t own a home or carry a mortgage. When academic intellectuals and all professors — by the close of the 1970s — had mortgages and car payments to meet, and student loans to repay if they were relatively young, they were living the capitalist life style.

If salaries cannot keep pace with the cost of home ownership (they won’t), there may yet be a return to a serious intellectual critique of capitalism which students will be grateful to have.

The role of liberalism has always been one of ruling-class prophylactic against left resistance ,and whether that entails vanguard statism or small-cale collectivism of anarchist theory ,it is all socialism and hence class struggle . So ,in a strange way ,I’m defending the mushball ,supine nature of liberalism ,because it has no philosophical core and positions itself with very elastic beliefs between ruling and class-based power .

FDR was a great liberal because he saved capitalism when over a million card-carrying communists had convinced labor that its dire straits were the fault of Wall St and revolution was in motion .We enjoyed a mixed economy based upon the ND and the GS when the USSR competed in the market marketplace of ideas ,and now there is no left and we lost a three decade class war without even knowing one was waged.Debating all this structuralist monkeyshit as our lives went into the globalist toilet ,we lost our national sovereignty ,and are now being held hostage to austerity confiscation based upon a debt fiction.We don’t even know how to resist ,so we wait for someone ,maybe Godot ,to save us .

You make an excellent point: the liberal/communist academics who played a huge role in the New Deal and the labor and reform movements that preceded it were largely the children of immigrants, raised by working class and striving parents.

Masaccio,
While it’s reassuring that you appreciate Rorty and his existentialist forebears, the frustration expressed concerning poststructuralism and deconstruction seems rooted in a desire for an unachievable “final vocabulary.” Rorty is quite consistent in his belief that private and public realms be kept separate, and complaints that such rhetorical strategies have bled from the private into the public always lead to charges of irresponsibility (which he dealt with thoroughly in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity). He sees logic and rationality as ancillary to dialectic and dislikes the sort of classification you are promoting. “If there is no center to the self, then there are only different ways of weaving new candidates for belief and desire into antecedently existing webs of belief and desire. The only important political distinction in the area is that between the use of force and persuasion.” I’m not sure where you find his advocacy of rational decision-making, but I’d love to see a citation.

nice take billwarren ,since political economy is also your discidline ,maybe you would agree that neoclassical economics is the class demarcation line .Keynes was a fine economist ,but his language and apparatus is employed at the Fed and with the Chi school ,and hence should not define the parameters of debate .I don;t think Paul Krugman would disagree that this a trap to once again frame liberalism as ”the reasonable left” .My point of departure is Thorstein Veblin and Adam Smith .Smith is great in his fears of monopoly and unrooted capital .

The word `strongly` was primarily used to indicate my value judgement about our current system.

Since I just educate people about the limits of political power available to U.S. citizens, the real question is do you engage in that type of activity yourself, and if not, why not? If you actually followed my links I am surprised that you didn`t comment on what your personal selections would be. Perhaps your issues would differ from mine. Do you feel you are capable of educate people about our political system – or not?

Are you perhaps opposed to educating U.S. citizens about limits to their political power, and are just too shy to mention it? In my experience that is that is a very common attitude.

Many people refuse to admit that they fear representative democracy. I spent hours going around in circles with an individual on an email list. I was pointing out that a widely used voting system called proportional representation would increase the voters choices, and a higher percentage of the voters would gain a seat at the political table.

Finally the poster summed up his problem with this particular voting system.

He wrote: `I worry that the wrong kind of people might get elected. I will not support any form of democracy, unless I am certain that only the right kind of people will get elected.`

After thinking about this for a while I replied that the form of `democracy` that he favored would probably also be acceptable to most kings and dictators. I have yet to find a king or dictator who would not find a form of government acceptable, if it insured that `only the right kind of people would get elected.`

He got very huffy! I suspect that he actually believed that he favored democracy. What he actually favored was using a political system to gain power for himself.

Definitely, or to go further, any theory based upon methodological individualism serves the interests of capital rather than wage-labor. In the social sciences MI is the notion, roughly, that all social phenomena are ultimately reducible to the psychologies, resources, and actions of individuals. Neoclassical economics is the most notable/infamous of these theories, but MI dominates Anglo-American social science (not so in Canada and most of the rest of the world). Marxists on the other hand are structuralists, demanding a “higher” level (i.e. at the level of society) explanation. So, if we are explaining a phenomenon such as unemployment, neoclassicals will construct an explanation which occurs completely at the level of the individual, say as a “choice” to forgo employment in favor of leisure, or as a series of poor choices (e.g., your brother in law dropped out of high high school after getting your sister pregnant and now is unemployable due to lack of skills). Marxists on the other hand explain unemployment structurally: when wages go up and profits therefore go down firms lay off workers, leading to unemployment and over-supply of workers, and a downward pressure on wages, and this occurs regardless of the behavior of any individuals alone or taken together. Neoclassicals say that society is the sum of its parts, whereas Marxists reject that argument. Why the construction of explanations is important is because they tell us what needs to change: for a neoclassical, stagnant wages require the acquisition of “skills” and productivity advancements, whereas Marxists say that such tinkering won’t change the overall process mentioned above.

Academics have little to offer. But post-modernism has little to do with it. Most people who paid any attention to the debate would probably say the post-modernists lost it anyway. If you go to McDonalds and order a large fries, their is no crisis of meaning. But professionalization and its consequences have much more to do with why academics have little to offer. One consequence is specialization. For example, if the rest of the academy actually had to engage with the junk science of economics, they would demand reforms. Another consequence is the need for endless letters of recommendation. Tenure is somewhat of a myth. Sure you get some job security at the associate level. But there are other levels after that. The UC system has many more than three pay levels and letters are needed for all of them. If an associate professor goes mouthing off oh for example about any of the Big American Lies, she won’t easily be promoted and she won’t easily be able to move to another university. And she knows that. Graduate students and junior faculty desperately want “prestigous” positions. Most aren’t really sure why. But they have been at it too long to really question what the hell they are doing and they aren’t going to jepordize their chances by actually saying what they believe. There are other factors too. Mindless scientism still reigns supreme in much of the academy and the culture at large. How else could a moron like Bill Gates get away with saying “technology is just a tool”? The debate about post-modernism is so 90s. Best to just leave it be. The academy lost its way a long time before that and for much more serious reasons.

Hackademics live and operate in fear of losing their precious tenure. Their underlings—permanent part time profit mules, or adjuncts—also live in terror of losing the piece of salt bread they get, and half of them actually aspire to join the Professorial “class,” and so will not unionize; although, ironically, their being about 50% of most college faculty now is exactly the point of power they refuse to exercise. (One strike and every college would grind to a halt until it deals with them like—ugh—human beings.)
But there ARE many college teachers who are constantly generating new conceptions of struggle against corporate fascism. Here is one—-a worldwide, nonviolent WALK OUT ON PROFIT as the core motive of world economics. Nothing to believe in, nobody to demonize—just a refusal to work any more than is necessary to pull our individual daily weight, and let the profit machine freak out until it’s dead (there’s actually NOTHING it can do when workers get together to do this). HOW? Please see WOOP: We the Workers of the World Walk Out On Profit, at jackdempseywriter at wordpress dot c-o-m. Peace, friends. We’ve got to get it together, because nobody can truly take away our power unless we hand it over—-in our daily labor.

Yes I understand that academics, or liberal talking heads, can`t be expected to do anything on their own. That is much to hard. I guess I am a worker class because I can write something and post it as a web page. ALL by myself!

Then I can fire-up twitter and do key word searches. That takes years to learn! I then can reply to some of those tweets with tweets of my own, that just happen to includes links to one of my web pages articles.

I like twitter because people can`t be sneered at as dumb or stupid by college students. Middle income people who work for a living are way better at insults than college students. There aren`t many low income people, other than retired or sick people, on twitter.

It doesn`t take much time or effort once you have written the article. I am retired and sometimes I can do it while listening to a audio book. Going to meetings could take much more time and probably have greater costs. I doubt it would be very efficient. When I go out for reasons other than meeting friends I would rather go to the beach or a good restaurant.

I tweet, perhaps, thirty educational tweets a week. Get say three or four thank-you`s or at least polite replies. One or two re-tweets.

Admittedly this is more for married or older retired people, but I bet you could do tabling or google hang outs. The point is that is not hard to do. If you are not doing it, it is because you don`t want to do it. It is not lack of money it does not cost much money.

I think you people miss the nature of the is country: libs are nothing more than guests here. The reactionary forces that own this country occasionally let you off the hook, and it is possible that back in the days of Roosevelt they took their eyes off the ball, and the war and other distractions let you come up. You started imagining that you have gained power. But probably starting with Kennedy assassination them forces reared their collective heads. Probably the main reason Kennedy was assassinated was because he needed to dismantle the CIA and was about to sign the bill. This was too much for these forces. So they let your run a few more years. but they slowly started putting the screws to you. But 9/11 was the event where they really took the gloves off. So this is where we are now. There is no room here for liberal ideology. If you don’t like it, that’s too bad. It is their world, and you are just visiting here. If you don’t like it, leave. This is U.S. is all about. You have no money, you have no power.

Hi billwarren#40 ,once again ,very nicely stated .I infer you might also be a fan of Jonathan Nitzan .I look forward to further comments from you on future threads .Have a nice evening .

Since I am an Indigenous Person with an over-arching affinity for a “consensus” Democracy, and thusly, I can’t take too seriously, the pundits that speak to and of the “classical” perspective for the “empire” that is the predicate for today’s politics, whether practiced by the “conservative” Republican or the “conservative” Democrats.

As such, it’s not the context and content of the use of language, but of the far more important, the “ideas” that will create and animate this “consensus” Democracy of which I constantly advocate for.

And as a Progressive, I am disappointed in my Brethren for this lack of gusto, especially when it comes to “empowering the Individual.” Since there is no Progressive Caucus in the Senate, I am now dependent on the Progressive Caucus in the House chamber. To wit, an Agenda for a Consensus Democracy, would start with a Privacy element that is part and parcel to this Consensus. As such, “privacy” would contain several elements, starting with Reproductive Rights and followed with recinding the Patriot Act.

And if the Progressive Caucus could not bring itself to introduce legislation for this “consensus” relative to Privacy, with its multiplicity of affective elements, it would behoove Progressives, writ large, to remove the “progressive” label from the Progressive Caucus.

In closing, I have yet to find even a few substantive Progressives in advocating for such, and which tells me that “intellectual liberals” are not the problem, but our use of Common Sense is supremely lacking in our political arena, writ large. And from here in the Sonoran Desert, this “lacking” is the neon sign that speaks to our frustration among our national community that is identified as “racial and ethnics” when compared to white Progressives, writ large.

Jaango

Corporatists. Federalists. Administrators. Professional managers. Experts. Pick your bureaucratic poison. All have lost the ability to communicate.

The classic example of the title of this article is George Lakoff and Frank Luntz. George writes scholarly articles talking about moral frames, which are wonderful to read, but devoid of practical application. Frank Luntz says, “Just use these words.”