David Seaton's News LinksIn following the presidential nominating campaign I am struck once again by how entertaining, full bodied and variegated the US right and ultra-right are, and how decaffeinated, watered down and mealymouthed those that pass for the American left are.
What a cast of characters the Republicans have! From libertarian eccentrics like Ron Paul right through to neofascist Rudy Giuliani, stirred in with folksy, guitar strumming, creationist, Mike Huckabee who sounds like the one-eyed Mullah Omar if he were reworked by Walt Disney.
In short they have a genuine culture. From center-right to far out, wacky right... no holds barred, in your face, what you see is what you get, pure reactionaries... A real spectrum, in fact a veritable monkey's ass of a party.
While, at the same time the American left is the sin that dare not speak its name.
Because don't kid yourself, neither Hillary or Obama would even qualify for the rightwing of the British Labor Party. On the continent they might just make it as Christian Democrats, but just barely... Anything like a sober, Swedish Social Democrat would be treated like Hugo Chávez on LSD with genital herpes by the US media.
It looks like the USA is heading into a nasty recession that is going to cause great pain to the "little guy": where even the middle class is going to discover that they have been shafted and there is no political organization prepared to pick up that ball and run with it. We can see that by the way a congress voted in to end the Iraq war just lies there.
Somebody (nobody but the American people) has to put together a grass roots movement to change all of this because the two party system is never going to deliver anything but more right wing (choose noun), because that is where the juice and the sincerity and the culture are.
Who could ever be the American Gandhi? DS
No comments:
Post a Comment