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well, we're in the modern world and if you're thinking inside of the capitalist mode of production the state is integral to it. and what's been obvious for some time is---like i said---conservatives tend to support the repressive state and others to support a more redistributive state. personally, i'd prefer a far more social-democratic approach, which in the present context would mean very significant cuts in military and other security expenditures and a reorientation of state policy away from the national security state toward something about industry and/or job creation. and education. that sort of thing.
it's well past time to dismantle the national security state.
the tea partiers tend, from what i've been able to figure out, to support increasing current levels of military spending while somehow imagining they can cut taxes and compensate for it by allowing the entire non-military economy to collapse (this an outline of the logic that'd follow in policy terms from what they say).
i wasn't joking earlier about the relation of the right to a notion of natural hierarchy as a jutification for diverting resources into repression.
and i wasn't joking when i talked about the ways in which the illusion that the conservative Subject---the position interpellated or constructed or posited through the ideology as its "object" or the person whom the constructs are "about"---is under continual attack is of a piece with the same thing.
the right is pretty transparent in terms of how most of its positions fit together if you think about it.
what makes contemporary conservatism in the us problematic (in my view) is not that it's ideologically smart--it isn't...but it is deftly fitted to the needs both of the economic masters it serves and the constituency it mobilizes in the service of those masters (one which is not at all the same)---but that the right is **organized** and that at the grassroots level and **very** efficiently.
the big fight, it seems to me, is between the tea partiers and republican party over who is going to be able to better use the organizational system to get out bodies at elections. the way that conflict goes---and i think (i am not sure, but i think) that's what we're seeing now, a conflict within the right---will determine the way the battle unfolds. it could be about a splitting of the right (i'm all for anything that weakens conservatives, so yay)---or it could be a struggle over who controls the republican party. at this point it's hard to say.
that's my take.
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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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