:
: *Big deal... so you vote for the crook. The real question is, "What do you do so that in four years, you don't have to go through the same exercise in lesser-evilism?"SDF: PRECISELY. Is the liberal Democrat "strategy" to hold their noses and forget about it until the next election? Can we book some liberal Democrats for a performance of Beckett's Waiting for Godot yet? I'll change the lines so as to portray the two main characters as liberal Democrats:
Vladimir: Let's vote our conscience in the election after this one.
Estragon: Let's vote our conscience in the election after this one.
They do not move.
On the other hand, has MDG or JD ever considered that if he and enough of his friends joined a progressive third party, that the Democrats might take some proactive steps to woo them back into the fold? This is precisely what has happened in New Mexico's local politics with the emergence of the New Mexico Green Party.
: I fear that Democracy is yet one more casualty of so-called 'consumerism.' We seem to think that political choices are something over which we have no control and candidates are merely another corporate offering. It's Coke or New Coke.
SDF:
The consumers are the workers and employees, the
fammers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them,
body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them.
As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.
The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office, just as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces that were tumed against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, from Dialectic of Enlightenment: But isn't that the whole point of such democratic-oligarchy? To let people think they actually have a choice? That includes the neo-nazi loons out there... throw in an RC cola now and then. In the end, they know everyone will go for the Coke.
:
: We'd better wise-up to the fact that none of this nonsense is going to change unless those of us with nothing to lose and everything to gain by change, change it.
SDF: What about those who have something to lose by its continuation?
