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nonsense, ustwo.
first you act as though conservatives have some monopoly on "rational thought"--which i assume means nothing beyond "statements i agree with"----second, folk who posted from a conservative position disappeared en masse after the november elections.
now you might think that this represented a reaction to "a level of discourse which was non-conductive to rational thought" but it looked a whole lot more like the tfp-right simply couldnt cope with your political movement being undermined--that is of the end of that conservative shangri-la that lasted from september 2001 through november 2006, during which conservative ideological statements and the "logic" of mainstream press coverage merged into a seamless continuum.
that's as good as it could get from the far right--the "war on terror' manufactured a degree of collective panic such that even the empty, incoherent memes particular to conservativeland seemed to function.
all the worse was the simple fact that your boy george w bush and his merry administration is entirely responsible for the undermining of the legitimacy of the politics for which he stands, outsourced and unaccountable, with liberty and capital accumulation for all the righteous and middleclass and fuck the rest, fuck them all.
all of which made it seem to me anyway that contemporary conservatism is most coherent as an oppositional movement, one which advances statements and implies programs without having to actually deliver on any of them--so that the consequences of the ideology remain implicit--and so long as they are implicit, folk who are inclined to think along those lines can pretend there would be no consequences--mostly because they are imagining the programs that they might like to see.
so for example, the rumsfeldian "just in time" war is entirely contained within conservative arguments about "privatization"---but privatizing infrastructure and military functions is a debacle each time it is tried. better to avoid the material consequences of actually implementing the crackpot notion of privatization by not actually holding power.
that way "arguments" about privatization come down to an aesthetic matter--whether a particular statement corresponds to the projections you deploy when you imagine what "privatization" means.
and i think that many conservatives are most comfortable arguing from aesthetics or "principle"--when a reality that will no conform to simplistic forumlae that are predicated mostly on making the petit bourgeois feel more secure in its fantasyworld, when that reality diverges too far from questions of aesthetics or "principle" you find a suddent diminuition in participation in political debate--and in this particular micro-cosm, the disappearance of the tfp-right.
as for ubertuber's point above: for what it's worth, i dont see this as a philosophical question. it's immanent. the democrats are in a no=win situation in congress--they are taking a great sustained pounding at their own hands it seems by advancing claims that their position in congress simply does not allow them to implement without cross-over support from moderate republicans, such as they are--so they are ineivtably arguing from the right. everyone--the press, the democrats, the republicans--wants to locate/define an anti-war "movement" or "sentiment" or "population" and put it somewhere--and by doing that to quarantine it---so everyone jockeys for position by floating definitions of this anti-war phenomenon--but it seems futile, in that opposition to the war in iraq is so widespread that it crosses out of conventional ways of distinguishing one group for another--leaving only a few stalwarts on the militarist right trying to figure out some way of defending what by any rational measure is a debacle, a "nightmare without end" in the words of the last of the man generals who have retired and then gone public saying that this iraq thing is fucked up.
the democrats are forced to the right-center positionally. they think they can benefit from tapping into opposition to the farce that is bushworld. but they cant find this opposition, and even if they could, their tactical position is at cross purposes with even looking for an opposition. if they are doing it anyway, and trying to position themselves with reference to an opposition, then they are hoisting themselves up a long mast all by themselves, where they will dangle, upside down and in the wind, next election. only a fuckup like george w bush carries enough negative weight to prevent damage. and that guy isnt running. (thank whomever might be out there watching over the cosmos for that much, even though i am sure she's too busy to bother much with american domestic politics)
the republicans want to identify the democrats with this opposition too, as a way of positioning them to the left of where they really are in order to scare the moderates--many of whom are disgusted by bushworld--into towing the party line anyway, at least on election day.
the press mostly wants to be able to act as though it has control over information, so wants to locate this population for its own reasons. given the amorphousness of the term "opposition" and the fact that tv remains as it is (for example) the groups with the shortest, pithiest memes get air time, and so it seems that the republicans are still defining the democrats for them, because they pretend to know where this "opposition" to bushworld is, and in rightwing land, this is "the left"--you know, the fifth column and all that shit.
as for the op, i dont have much of anything to say about it.
not at this point anyway.
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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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