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see this left category doesnt really signify anything.
i come out of marxism but am not a marxist--there are lots of reasons for this, some to do with the datedness of marx's work, some to do with the history associated with that work. i do not particularly identify with any organization: i see myself as being to some extent caught in the vacuum created by the implosion of the old-school left (which still twitches, but which in the main was finished by the mid 1980s in most places) and trying to figure out how to talk about that vacuum and being caught in it while still remaining engaged in the world, in critique of that world.
old school conservative ideology is imploding all over the world--what you have trying to move in to protect radical nationalism is variants of the french front nationale--and the bush administration, along with the whole of the populist right in the states, is among these. the bush administration is VERY far to the right--the democrats are at best centrist--they would be moderates if the americans had anything like a wide political spectrum. but it doesnt. it has THIS spectrum, which is very very narrow and very very conservative.
the idea that the american democratic party is a leftist organization strikes me as hilarious. it is so deeply, thoroughly wrong that it is difficult to know where to even start taking it apart. there is a "progressive" element within the democratic party. but they are not the main power either within the party apparatus nor insofar as the party's lines are concerned. personally, i think the democrats take these folk for granted. i think that is a mistake, but whatever.
these "progressives" are---AT THEIR MOST RADICAL---weak social democrats. social democrats are perfectly happy within the existing order, but they have views concerning issues like the distribution of wealth and power that are quite different from those you see floating about in neoliberaland, but they are not wholly exclusive of them either, nor are they interested in blowing up the capitalist order itself--they in the main see addressing questions of social justice as better for business.
so i really have no idea what you are talking about--if you are talking about anything at all--when you repeat the view of the american political spectrum particular to rush limbaugh and speak in terms of an actual left. it is crazy... there is no left in the united states...not at the mass political level. the "looney left" is entirely in your imagination. from idiots like limbaugh, it is nothing more and nothing less than updated redbait-speak, the primary function of which is to conceal the extent to which the republicans had been dominated by an extreme, fringe type of radical conservatism.
(i use the past tense in a moment of optimism for all of us)
the situation is quite different at the grassroots level, particularly in the cities, but you would never know that by looking at the main parties.
so i see nothing at all in the notion of the "left" as you describe it, and so the notion of "moderate" seems meaningless to me. it is not surprising that the closest thing you get to a definition is social liberal fiscal conservative--which is hardly wrong as a position--but it shows how close the parties really are.
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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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