Markin comment:
Chalk it up to my recent reading of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery for being on the scent of the civil war theme, okay. A couple of days ago I placed William Butler Yeats’ somewhat flowery and mystical Meditation In The Time Of Civil War as an entry in this space with a short commentary that the political air, in the wake of the 2010 elections in America had, at first bloom, that sense of foreboding that I felt in reading Foner’s book as the American Civil War hit Lincoln right in the face and that I also believe Yeats was feeling in the period of the Irish Civil War of the 1920s.
Needless to say, in the age of the Internet, or maybe just in the age of the cantankerousness of some of my political co-workers that little seemingly off-hand comment could not just settle into cyberspace oblivion. In any case they were “worried” that I had gone off the political deep end in my somewhat simply analogy and unspecified talk of civil war. And I have to agree, at least to the point that the civil war analogy might be overblown. But hear me out as I try to quickly run out one train of thought on the question.
Of course the history of American election cycles has produced all kinds of “waves” (the current favored media term of usage for these quick mood swings by the electorate that shows up, or doesn’t). The 2010 elections can be taken, and at some level should be taken, as just an extreme example of that voter fickleness and quirkiness and just move on. However, when one looks at some of the underlying data, and as importantly, the anecdotal evidence that is beginning to accumulate that drumbeat that has been getting increasingly louder over the past couple of years (even before Obama’s election) by the Tea Party elements and right-wing yahoos in pursuit of their central slogan “We want to take our country back,” should give those of us of the left cause for pause. The case for this Tea-ish phenomenon as a racial backlash has already been fairly well made. More importantly, this election was an in-your-face victory by the “haves”, mainly the rich and well-off but also refracted through the working class, or that part of the working class that is still working.
Now all of this can add up to a tempest in a tea pot (to carry on with the tea-ish symbolism) and the addition of a few million jobs fast could break the populist back of such a movement. But that is not likely, not soon anyway according to those who claim to know. And have a vested interest in knowing. That is the point where I am starting to smell just the faintest whiff of gun powder in the air. To put it in American civil war terms, since I am, seemingly, under the spell of that event I think that we are right now in a period somewhere analogous to the period just after the ugly and ultimately futile Compromise of 1850 where the two sided were feeling each other out and both sides, and I mean both sides, were unhappy with that compromise. Moreover, the more far-sighted on both sides knew where things were heading. And that is what we of the extra-parliamentary left should be doing, paying very close attention to which way the winds are shifting. And organizing, organizing like crazy around our central slogan of fighting for a workers party that fights for a workers government.
Chalk it up to my recent reading of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery for being on the scent of the civil war theme, okay. A couple of days ago I placed William Butler Yeats’ somewhat flowery and mystical Meditation In The Time Of Civil War as an entry in this space with a short commentary that the political air, in the wake of the 2010 elections in America had, at first bloom, that sense of foreboding that I felt in reading Foner’s book as the American Civil War hit Lincoln right in the face and that I also believe Yeats was feeling in the period of the Irish Civil War of the 1920s.
Needless to say, in the age of the Internet, or maybe just in the age of the cantankerousness of some of my political co-workers that little seemingly off-hand comment could not just settle into cyberspace oblivion. In any case they were “worried” that I had gone off the political deep end in my somewhat simply analogy and unspecified talk of civil war. And I have to agree, at least to the point that the civil war analogy might be overblown. But hear me out as I try to quickly run out one train of thought on the question.
Of course the history of American election cycles has produced all kinds of “waves” (the current favored media term of usage for these quick mood swings by the electorate that shows up, or doesn’t). The 2010 elections can be taken, and at some level should be taken, as just an extreme example of that voter fickleness and quirkiness and just move on. However, when one looks at some of the underlying data, and as importantly, the anecdotal evidence that is beginning to accumulate that drumbeat that has been getting increasingly louder over the past couple of years (even before Obama’s election) by the Tea Party elements and right-wing yahoos in pursuit of their central slogan “We want to take our country back,” should give those of us of the left cause for pause. The case for this Tea-ish phenomenon as a racial backlash has already been fairly well made. More importantly, this election was an in-your-face victory by the “haves”, mainly the rich and well-off but also refracted through the working class, or that part of the working class that is still working.
Now all of this can add up to a tempest in a tea pot (to carry on with the tea-ish symbolism) and the addition of a few million jobs fast could break the populist back of such a movement. But that is not likely, not soon anyway according to those who claim to know. And have a vested interest in knowing. That is the point where I am starting to smell just the faintest whiff of gun powder in the air. To put it in American civil war terms, since I am, seemingly, under the spell of that event I think that we are right now in a period somewhere analogous to the period just after the ugly and ultimately futile Compromise of 1850 where the two sided were feeling each other out and both sides, and I mean both sides, were unhappy with that compromise. Moreover, the more far-sighted on both sides knew where things were heading. And that is what we of the extra-parliamentary left should be doing, paying very close attention to which way the winds are shifting. And organizing, organizing like crazy around our central slogan of fighting for a workers party that fights for a workers government.
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