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voting instrumentally--e.g. for kerry to get rid of bush--is not a matter of "party trumping person" at all--if anything it is quite the opposite--it demonstrates a kind of distance from the existing ideologies. this should be obvious.
many of my friends have been talking about nader of late--most of us supported him either in principle or in fact last time out, but that support weakened in the final weeks of the election once the spectre of a bush presidency became plausible. if the party logic that your theorem (not a theory) held, you would have no way of explaining that.
the same arguments resurfaced earlier in the spring---in this case, despite the fact that nader is much closer to the views of this particular collective, all but one of us not only will not vote for nader, but actively hopes he pulls out the the race--getting rid of bush is far too important.
there was a book mentioned in another thread--something on the order of how the democrats lost "the heartland"--that argues the emergence of issues that appeal to cultural conservatives have functioned to mobilize people to the right even while the effect of that move is to rally people to support a party whose policies in no way are structured around any coherent defense of their economic or social interests--i want to read the book (i have to remember the whole title when it counts, when i am actually in a bookstore [i like touching the books i buy--i cant help it] to pull this off, you see--otherwise i buy other books) to see how the argument works, but it seems quite plausible--in which case the argument would follow that party and discourse are not identical, and that many people--not just this abstraction i mentioned above in thinking while writing about this book---vote following discourse. ideology, in an alternative parlance.
--an aside: please dont argue back that supply side actually works in the interests of the lower middle class and poor---you wont persuade me, the evidence is simply not there to support you if you want to argue it, and i will either not be able to respond from laughing or end up becoming snarky because i get impatient with this kind of fatuousness, even if it does operate in some alternate world as a coherent discourse. for an explanation, see below.
as for my political position, it is curious--in general i am well to the left of any position that operates in the american political spectrum, which i regard as laughably narrow. in general, i think that social democracy is about the best that capitalism can hope for in terms of things like equity. but it is a strange system (and is **not** the same as central planning, just to head off an objection i sense is coming)....my economic and political views are shaped in many ways by a long engagement with marxism---but my actual work is about the collapse of marxism as a political formation and as a counter-discourse--it is not possible at any level to actually be a marxist in 2004---you would have to be a fool or a trotskyite (or maybe a "radical" in a univeristy english department...) one continuity from this engagment is that i tend to reject out of hand any attempt to separate economic ideology from social factors, for example (which is why the supply side thing is to my mind a joke conceptually and a fiasco in practice, and also why i am often dismissive to the point of impatience with neoclassical economic theory, with illusions about the free market, and so forth)
this is probably going to get me redbaited on this forum from this point on. maybe no-one will read the thread. maybe i should delete this.
o what the hell.
i think the space on the left remains to be re-articulated and any look around you should demonstrate that there is a crying need for that process to be under way. for this to happen, there has to be a square confrontation with the history of the left, one that takes full account of the disasters that have befallen it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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