Lecture Five in the Ideological Critique series has been recorded and will be posted this Friday. Half way through! Whew, this is a real challenge, but I have mastered the technical side of things, at long last.
I think I have finally had it with Krugman, whom I have been reading for a while now. He is just too much a flack for Clinton. He is also very thin-skinned about the criticism he is receiving for that choice.
Even if Bernie does not win the nomination, which I assume he will not, he has changed the character of the public conversation dramatically. Not too bad for a 74 year old Jewish socialist from Vermont.
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May or may not come as a surprise, but I donated to Sander's campaign this morning. Even my militant orthodox Marxist stance recognizes that there is something going with this man's campaign, and it NEEDS to spread.
^ I second that. We might all have reservations about some of his politics, or the ability of elections to effect social transformation, but it would be irresponsible not to seize the opening his campaign is creating for a stronger left.
I have serious problems with his foreign policy, stance on Israel, and advocacy of Obama's drone policy. I would also really like to see what Sanders has to say about Obama's Kill List, and I wish he hadn't said that Edward Snowden deserves prosecution. And then of course on economic policy he's not as left as I am (I would like worker's ownership of the means of production), but the reason I'm still willing to vote for him is that this would be the one election where the overall American political spectrum could cease to move rightward. Bill Clinton was to the right of Carter, and continued Reagan's cutting of 'big government', Obama is basically Bob Dole or early Mitt Romney, and Hillary is just a continuation of that. Voting for the 'lesser of two evils' usually still means shifting the country to the right nonetheless. But an actual Bernie win seems like an actual shift leftward. Two steps rightward, one step left! Our new American motto!
Sanders is politically astute. He's wisely not talking about an anti-imperialist foreign policy, which would turn off, I believe from a distance (I live in Chile), the white working class and lower middle class, whom he is wooing, apparently with some success. He's not waving a Viet Cong flag or singing the Sandinista hymn (leaving aside all the merits of the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas), the stuff that alienates the white working class and lower middle class from the left.
I watched some Sanders' videos in YouTube and he talks a lot about fighting back and organizing against the elites, against big money and against a system which screws ordinary people, all of which I agree with. However, that kind of talk must freak Krugman out, since Krugman, although anti-neoliberal, is the kind of intellectual who sees all change as coming from enlightened elites, people with Ph.D.'s from top universities and for Krugman, the masses organizing and fighting back must seem uncouth.
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