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jorgelito:
it seems to me that there are no automatic political movements, no underlying dynamic that would bring a left movement into existence in response to the drift into radical nationalism of the populist right. if there was such a dynamic (where would it unfold? what would drive it? god? History or geist in hegel's sense?) you would no doubt already be seeing the results.
on the other hand, i could see sustained public pressure from a range of groups who oppose--say--the war in iraq as having the potential to shift the terms of debate away from their current idiotic state--but where is that sustained pressure? during the vietnam period, it appears that the great mobilizer was the introduction of the draft more than it was principled opposition to the war---the direct repression carried out by state authorities functioned to widen and radicalize the movement. so far, the draft has been avoided (a function of fear of consequences no doubt) and the militarization of the police has been carried out smoothly--perhaps with the way paved by the deluge of sycophantic television programs like "cops" or "america's most wanted"--who knows.
sometimes i wonder if there is another explanation: the vietnam period unfolded within a context of overall economic expansion (tipping into stagnation near the end) in a period before you had the fundamental problems of the status of nation-states that subsequent phases of capitalist development have posed---in a political environment shaped by the "new left" reappropriation of traditional marxian discourse----so opposition could take place against a relatively stable framework and within a relatively stable tradition. all this is gone now. i sometimes wonder if people have retreated to the private sphere because they are fundamentally afraid of what is happening around them--and their education and the ideological system that take that education as its basis, provides them with neither a coherent view of what is unfolding at the structural level nor a discourse that would enable them to make sense of it. as for the first factor, this seems to me one of the few areas where the concentration of ownership of mass media outlets is a direct factor: why would major corporations have any interest in enabling a critical view of the system that they rely upon to extract profits to originate with media they control?
as for the second: reflexivity is easy if the frames of reference that shape it are given in advance. it is a much more complex and difficult process when you have to fashion the frame and perform the action. in the former case, reflexivity opens onto critique within the purview of conventional politics. in the latter, it is a philosophical problem.
i have been teaching at the university level for about 10 years: one overwelming and sad fact that i have run into is that students coming out of high school are not equipped--at all--to deal with philosophy. and this from a context of very good schools, which draw what you would think are elite students. they do not have the training, they do not have the background, they are not exposed to it. it is not that students are stupid--quite the contrary--but they are not being introduced to independent thinking at the high school level. they simply are not. what they are trained in is the copying of Authorities. philosophy is in general understood as a type of textual commentary--the authorities do the work, the commentaries tweak implications.
this seems to me a choice made at the level of cirriculum design. in this pathetic neoliberal world, thinking for yourself is not functional. so there is no reason to give students the tools to do it. better to copy. better to repeat.
so it seems to me that in a context shaped by vertigo, they are totally powerless. this can change over the course of a university education--but university functions as the only space within which that is going to happen (in the main--there are exceptions) and even there, one is under no particular compulsion to get this kind of training.
if this is accurate in a more general sense (that is, if the information i presented based on my experience is more than anecdotal), the general problem would explain something of the rise of the contemporary populist right: it provides the illusion of stability by trafficking in self-evidently problematic categories (nationalism, chauvinism, etc.) and uses these categories as devices to present a radically simplified world to its demographic. part of the emotional attachment to the ideology of the extreme right comes i think from this basically therapeutic function: simplification of a complex world anchored in the repetition of familiar categories. that this is worthless if the idea is to take account of complexity is apparently secondary--simplification and repetition and reassurance are apparently primary.
i think this gets to the article that you posted as well, host.
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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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