Reply #3: Yes, that's a keen insight [View All]

[gottaB]

I will add to that, and offer a criticism. The opinion polls you are talking about are not "unslanted." They are looking at policy positions. That reflects a bias of a large class of educated elites. The notion that politicians are primarily put in place to enact and carry out policy would seem to be a rational view of government. In fact, it may be rather be rationalist. Alienation, identification, persuasion and deception are political realities. Their operations do not conform to the expectations of naive rationalisms, but they are nonetheless susceptible to reasonable inquiry.

Associations do exist between political parties and evocations like warm fuzzies, scary monsters, apple pie, and the like. The finest gramscian analysis cannot undo them. At best it might provide insight into the way things work. I say this with some sadness, and also an abiding faith in a human potential for surpassing the self: One cannot hope to emancipate the masses from the structures of their own minds. Revolution, if it comes, comes from within. It is possible and indeed desirable to assist people who endeavor to make such a journey, but ultimately one person's destination cannot be set by another.

This philosphical point suggests to me that while a revolutionary poetics may be useful for the left, especially at this time, in the long run it cannot assure victory or the establishment of any political utopia. We can enlarge our capacity for understanding and communicating, and we can make the moral choice to help people rather than hinder them.