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thomas frank is on the radio right now---he wrote "what happened to kansas?" and is arguing that if progressives are going to understand this farce that is unfolding around us as we sit here typing---his argument is that people need to take right media strategies seriously as an analytic probelm in themselves--because what explains this election, it seems, more than any other single factor, is the success of those strategies. from which follows an understanding of the types of media these strategies employ. which then connects to features of american social geography.
i dont think looking at this the other way round will help anything because you end up imputing alot of features to a population as if these populations carried these features around like balloons attached to their beltloops. there is a mediating system, one that is amenable to analysis, that has been amenable to analysis...
like gramsci said long ago, in a pre- or non-revolutionary situation, politics is a war of position. position is worked out across the modalities of cultural domination. the right is simply better at using this form of domination at this point.
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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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