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i agree that it is kind of hard to have what should be the sort of debates that happen all the time in a democracy---even one like the american---because there are these horrific systems like the military patronage system/national security state in place. and i think the american political system genuinely suffers for them.
as for this left you keep mentioning--who are they? you can't possible mean the democratic party of the past 70-odd years, can you? there are a couple people in congress who are close to social democrats--sanders in particular--but that's it. fear of the left, fear of communism, has long driven american politics to the right. at the moment, there are extreme and moderate conservatives. obama is a clinton style centrist without the same feel for communications strategy. there isn't even an organized left at the national level in the states. nothing like it. the closest there's been since vietnam is the anti-war movement that was organized using email trees by move on against the iraq war. when move on decided to play ball with the democratic party, the movement disappeared. it was a classic anti-war movement too---people were mobilized because of what they opposed--but there was no discussion, and no mechanism for discussion, about what people were for.
the national security state system is difficult to revolt against---witness what's happening in egypt. there too you have a movement that was largely held together by what they were against---what's remarkable about egypt now is that there is a process--diffuse and largely off-camera---of working out what people who opposed mubarak might be for. they are way way ahead of the united state in that. not even on the same map.
and you're right---in the main the democrats have supported the national security state. but they haven't done so in the way the republicans have. and that is what distinguishes them. the democrats represent a different faction of the dominant class order---there are actual disagreements about what constitutes a coherent approach to government and what coherent relations there can be between state and private sector. but they are, in the main, not even social democrats.
i know some of the main people who have tried to organize and finance a left opposition within the democratic party. where are they? they haven't been able to move from the grassroots level to the national political level. why is that? there's a host of reasons, one of which is they know what's happened to the democratic party and are trying to figure out ways to organize that do not entail a separation between base and party structure like happened with the democrats, for which the people are essentially only important to the extent they turn out at the polls. same as the republicans.
this is what plutocracy looks like. it's all around you. it's rigid and stupid and ugly. it doesnt have to be this way but people in positions of power lack the imagination to make this system any different and the people themselves are not engaged politically. so the plutocracy does as it likes and takes polls in order to fob themselves off as reflecting the will of some largely imaginary polity. it's a soft authoritarian system afflicted with an ideological crisis of quite significant proportions and there's no way out of it that's obvious from here. no way out until the shit really hits the fan and in order to prevent the far right lunatics from taking power something will get floated as an alternative.
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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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