The center: a compromise between totalitarianism and democracy
Remember Cheers? Remember Sammy, the harassment-addicted ex-baseball player? He was a model "liberal", the moderate centralist always ready to make a compromise. "Let's see, I want us to have sex 25 times, and you don't want to have sex at all. What's half of 25?"
Big polluter industries make organizations that demand "balance" and "moderation". Instead of having stillborn deformed babies with four eyes and antlers, we'll shoot for three eyes and a unicorn horn. Why be roasted by an ozone hole when we can be merely singed? Isn't that a reasonable price for saving 5 bucks on air conditioners? (And 5 million bucks more profit to the CEO?)
By the way, answer to Sammy's question was "Your IQ." Perhaps an overestimation for people who think they can achieve anything through compromise with tyrants.
Al Gore doesn't approve of Bill's actions. I don't approve of even mentioning the whole childish mess.
Jimmy Carter
Tom wicker, Washington correspondent: "the available evidence is that Mr Carter so far is opting for wall street's confidence".
"Mr Carters actions, commentary, and particularly his cabinet appointments, have been highly reassuring to the business community" -Anon. reporter.
"What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions" -Samuel Huntington, Harvard political scientist, trilateral commission report.
Now we have more than just "available evidence" - and he was so right-wing the only problem Reagan could find was that a bunch of US hostages made the country look "impotent" (which doesn't make me respect Bob Dole any more, though I'll admit admitting his "dysfunction" (PC alert!) Took a lot of bal - no, that's not the right word at all...).
From the column Media Beat by Normon Solomon:
"The "vital center" -- a phrase that was dormant for several decades -- became a mantra for Clinton's second term. On Dec. 11, 1996, in his first major policy speech after winning re-election, the president vowed to "forge a coalition of the center." And he called for "a vital American center where there is cooperation across lines of party and philosophy." Appropriately, Clinton delivered the speech to a forum hosted by the Democratic Leadership Council...
From the outset, while loudly claiming to speak for America's middle class, the DLC owed its prominence to generous financial support from decidedly upper-class patrons: Arco, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific, Martin Marietta, the Petroleum Institute and other denizens of corporate America.
As a matter of routine, well-heeled lobbyists flocked to DLC functions. "There's no question you can define `special interest' as our sponsors," the DLC's president, Al From, acknowledged with rare candor. In March 1989, when From's group held its annual conference, nearly 100 lobbyists subsidized the event by paying between $2,500 and $25,000 each. A year later, in the spring of 1990, Clinton began his stint as chair of the DLC.
Writing last month in The New Democrat, the DLC's magazine, From credited his organization with laying the groundwork for "Third Way politics" that have swept the United States as well as much of Europe and Latin America. "The Third Way's roots are firmly planted in our New Democrat movement," he declared. "Indeed, the Democratic Leadership Council has a rightful claim to paternity." What does all this talk about the "vital center" and the "Third Way" really mean?
Amid a geyser of misty rhetoric (for instance, "the Third Way is the worldwide brand name for progressive politics for the Information Age"), Al From supplies a basic clue. "Third Way governments," he explains, "create opportunities, rather than guarantee outcomes." Such buzzwords are common among DLC hotshots and their powerful allies inside the Democratic Party.
This year, Mark Penn -- a top DLC pollster and strategist rejoiced that "the Democratic Party is moving into the vital center of American politics and away from the political left." [Read: moving to the right] He contended that "the views of voters who identify themselves as Democrats today are converging with those of the American electorate as a whole in the vital center of American politics...success lies in advocating a government that provides opportunity, not guarantees."
...But is "opportunity" sufficient? Even if each person faced the same odds (a far cry from social realities), would we praise a lottery for providing everyone with an "opportunity" to win? What about the losers?
...Huge gaps between rich and poor? Don't bother us about "outcomes." A lot of poverty in our midst? Well, everybody has an opportunity to succeed. Scant regulatory curbs on large corporations? Hey, the era of big government is over.
Centrist approaches are usually based on power, not equity or justice. Consider some recent words from the author of the 1949 book titled "The Vital Center."
Last spring, in an article for Society magazine, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that the "vital center" phrase in his famous book "refers to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism, not at all to the so-called `middle of the road' preferred by cautious politicians of our own time." "
Reformists can present the public with they've done and say "look, all is better now. The system worked." Trouble is that over time, the problems will only continue to grow, because the reforms didn't tackle them in the first place.
Reformists also tend to objectify the people whom they are "helping;" they envision them as helpless, formless masses who need the wisdom and guidance of the "best and the brightest" to lead them to the Promised Land. Reformists mean well, but this is altruism borne of ignorance, which is destructive over the long run. As Malatesta put it, "[i]t is not true to say . . . [that anarchists] are systematically opposed to improvements, to reforms. They oppose the reformists on the one hand because their methods are less effective for securing reforms from government and employers, who only give in through fear, and because very often the reforms they prefer are those which not only bring doubtful immediate benefits, but also serve to consolidate the existing regime and to give the workers a vested interest in its continued existence." [Life and Ideas, p. 81]
Reformists are scared of revolutionaries, who are not easily controlled; what reformism amounts to is an altruistic contempt for the masses (think of attempts to "civilize the savages", in which natives were put in the world's first concentration camps) Reformists mean well, but they don't grasp the larger picture--by focusing exclusively on narrow aspects of a problem, they choose to believe that is the whole problem. The disaster of the urban rebuilding projects in the United States (and similar projects in Britain which moved inter-city working class communities into edge of town developments during the 1950s and 1960s) are an example of reformism at work: upset at the growing slums, reformists supported projects that destroyed the ghettos and built brand-new housing for working class people to live in. They looked nice (initially), but they did nothing to address the problem of poverty and indeed created more problems by breaking up communities and neighborhoods.
Logically, it makes no sense. Why dance around a problem when you can attack it directly? Reformists dilute revolutionary movements, softening and weakening them over time. The AFL-CIO labour unions in the USA, like the ones in Western Europe, killed the labour movement by narrowing and channeling labour activity and taking the power from the workers themselves, where it belongs, and placing it the hands of a bureaucracy. And that's precisely what reformists do; they suck the life from social movements until the people who are supposed to be in a better situation because of the reformists end up in a worse situation.
Reformists say, "don't do anything, we'll do it for you."
Also, it is funny to hear left-wing "revolutionaries" and "radicals" put forward the reformist line that the capitalist state can help working people (indeed be used to abolish itself!). Despite the fact that leftists blame the state and capitalism for most of the problems we face, they usually turn to the state (run primarily by rich - i.e. capitalist - people) to remedy the situation, not by leaving people alone, but by becoming more involved in people's lives. They support government housing, government jobs, welfare, government-funded and regulated child care, government-funded drug "treatment," and other government-centered programs and activities. If a capitalist (and racist/sexist/authoritarian) government is the problem, how can it be depended upon to change things to the benefit of working class people or other oppressed sections of the population like blacks and women?
Instead of encouraging working class people to organize themselves and create their own alternatives and solutions to their problem (which can supplement, and ultimately replace, whatever welfare state activity which is actually useful), reformists urge people to get the state to act for them. However, the state is not the community and so whatever the state does for people you can be sure it will be in *its* interests, not theirs. As Kropotkin put it:
"each step towards economic freedom, each victory won over capitalism will be at the same time a step towards political liberty - towards liberation from the yoke of the state. . . And each step towards taking from the State any one of its powers and attributes will be helping the masses to win a victory over capitalism." [_Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets_, pp. 181-2]
Getting the state out of the way is the only thing that will lead to the changes that can produce an improvement in the lives of working class people. Encouraging people to rely on themselves instead of the state can lead to self-sufficient, independent, and, hopefully, more rebellious people - people who will rebel against the real evils in society (authoritarian exploitation and oppression, racism, sexism, ecological destruction, and so on) and not their neighbors.
Working class people, despite having fewer options in a number of areas in their lives, due both to hierarchy and restrictive laws, still are capable of making choices about their actions, organizing their own lives and are responsible for the consequences of their decisions, just as other people are. To think otherwise is to infantilise them, to consider them less fully human than other people and reproduce the classic capitalist vision of working class people as means of production, to be used, abused, and discarded as required. Such thinking lays the basis for paternalistic control of their lives by the government, ensuring their continued dependence and poverty and the continued existence of capitalism and the state.
Band-aiding nominated for two Darwin awards:
Citation one: "The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale." (These are the only Darwin awards nominated to animals)
Citation two, from the same source, mentioned animal rights protesters who died in a stampede, though I can't be certain this wasn't a murder.
Both of the awards are unconfirmed the statistic at top sounds suspiciously like a think tank sound bite, but who cares? The amount of Darwin awards earned by gun-loons is phenomenal.