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i dont think it makes sense to abandon the federal level and focus on the local in anything like an exclusive way. first because the federal level is where in the contemporary capitalist framework that basic policy directions are determined and on that basis quite significant resources allocated---without which state and local governments would implode in a hurry. second because of the nature of major media coverage. the focus on the Person of the Leader, often walking into or out of a hotel of office building (because the entrance shot is a basic element in the vocabulary of pretend-youre-there) would make a royalist blush. there would need to be an accompanying shift in media. it's entirely possible to effect such a shift but it'd have to be strategized and attended to.
the consequences of not attending sufficiently to packaging is one of the main stories of the obama administration. that in a context of continuous reactionary hatchet-jobs...well, you see the results of this. i'm not saying this is the only problem...but if the right is entirely oriented around "winning" news cycles and the administration isn't really playing the game, there'll be a period in which the administration will seem to be moving backward. it's an illusion created by different media strategies.
but the point is that attending to this transform seems to me important.
personally, i can't imagine anything short of social-democracy getting the united states out of the conservative-engendered clusterfuck it is in materially.
the ideological problem is more fundamental. what i would maintain is that if the united states were a democracy in any serious sense and if debate amongst the polity was meaningful and serious critique something indulged in, then neo-liberalism would be pulverized simply by being held to account for its own disastrous legacy. that the right has anything to talk about is in itself an indication of the dysfunction of american democracy.
and there are others.
i think structural change is possible. but it'll take something a whole lot more thought-out and radical than seems possible so long as the illusion persists that it makes any sense at all to govern from the center.
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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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