From: orwell@erich.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d
Subject: Re: The Fraudulent Concern over ``Political Correctness"
Date: 7 Jan 1993 07:23 PST
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In article <JMC.93Jan5213341@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>, jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU 
[John McCarthy] replies to me...
> 
>I figured Brookings wouldn't be left enough for you.  I can see why
>you say the rightwingers had it all their own way for 12 years.  You
>regard the Democrats as just another branch of the same party, so
>that when the Democrats in Congress fought with Reagan, to you it
>was just shadow boxing.  Not to me.  We conservatives lost quite
>a few.
> 

My remark about the Democratic Party and Brookings was a sign
that I do not accept a debate based on the false premises of
contrasting `liberal' Democrats versus `conservative' Republicans.
But this refusal is not a result of ignorant cynicism.
A large number of fallacious, trivial, or meaningless debates
concerning the U.S. can be avoided by a firmly based knowledge of the real,
not mythological, political economy.

The single most useful book I have found
for this purpose is Michael Parenti's "Democracy for the Few"
(5th edition, 1987, St. Martin's Press), which gives both an
overview of state capitalism as practiced in the U.S.
and specific examples; it is usefully
supplemented by William Grieder's recent book "Who Will Tell
the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy" (1992, Simon and
Schuster) which goes into more detail on some specific examples
(but does not, to my mind, give as useful an overview).
One of the key insights here is that the two parties *do* compete
vigorously for the prizes of office (so it's not `shadow-boxing'
in this sense), but not by offering serious policy
alternatives to the voting public.

To quote Parenti (pgs. 175 -176, my ellipsis - the chapter is entitled
"The Greatest Show on Earth: Elections, Parties, and Voters"):

"... Another problem is the limited choice offered by the two major 
parties.  It is not quite accurate to characterize the Republicans and 
Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweddledum.  Were they exactly alike in 
image and posture, they would have even more difficulty than they do in 
maintaining the appearances of choice.  Therefore, it is preferable that 
the parties be fraternal rather than identical twins.  ...

Rather than sharpening the partisan differences between the major 
parties, the accession of Ronald Reagan, an unequivocal right-wing 
conservative, seemed to blur them still further, as many Democrats
retreated from a liberal agenda.  None of Reagan's programs, neither
the cutbacks in domestic services, nor the massive tax cuts favoring 
the upper-income brackets, nor the sharp escalation in the cold war 
and in military spending could have been enacted without help from a 
substantial number of Democrats.

From a progressive point of view, the problem with the Democrats is 
not that they are worse than or as bad as the Republicans, but that 
they are *perceived* as being far less conservative than they really 
are.  They are seen as the party of labor, the poor, and the 
minorities, when they have been the party of the business subsidies, 
tax breaks, and big military budgets almost as much as the GOP.  The 
upshot is that popular constituencies decide that the Democrats have 
their hearts in the right place and are doing the best they can
under the circumstances.  They forget that the Democrats are a major 
force in creating those circumstances. "
[Michael Parenti, "Democracy for the Few"]

From William Grieder, Chapter 2, "Bait and Switch" on tax policy
(pg. 89):

"The last progressive [in the usual meaning of taxation policy] tax measure
proposed by a U.S. president came from Jimmy Carter in fall of 1977.
It was decimated -- in a Congress controlled by Democrats.  ... A year
later, Congress cut the capital-gains rate in half, lowered the 
corporate tax rate and made the temporary investment-tax credit for business
permanent.  "Carter was screaming that this was a handout for rich 
people and peanuts for poor people," said Charls Walker whose Council 
on Capital Formation helped to inspire the revolt of the haves.
"We beat their ass two-to-one on the House floor." "
[William Grieder]

To connect the facts of political economy back to the essentially
fraudulent issue of `political correctness', insofar as there is any
justice in the criticism of various academic absurdities, I judge
these absurdities, tempests in teapots as they are, are a kind of
displacement activity caused by an inability (an
inability grounded in institutional contraints and conditioning rather
than simple incompetence) to discuss the real issues of power. 

To quote from Katha Pollitt's essay "Marooned on Gilligan's Island:
Are Women Morally Superior to Men?" [The Nation, December 28, 1992]
(the title is a pun on the name of author Carol Gilligan, who has advanced this
claim in her book "In a different Voice") regarding one example of 
this:

"For its academic proponents, the appeal lies elsewhere:  Difference
feminism [e.g. claims of women's inherent moral superiority based
on their nurturing role as mothers] is a way to carve out a safe space in the 
face of academia's resistance to female advancement.  It works much 
like multiculturalism, making an end-run around a static and 
discriminatory employment structure by creating an intellectual niche 
that can be filled only by members of the discriminated-against group. 
 And like other forms of multiculturalism, it looks everywhere for 
its explanatory force -- biology, psychology, sociology, cultural 
identity -- *except* economics.  The difference feminists cannot say 
that the differences between men and women are the result of their 
relative economic positions because that would be to move the whole 
discussion out of the realm of psychology and feel-good cultural pride 
and into the realm of a tough political struggle over the distribution 
of resources and justice and money."
[Katha Pollitt]

Ron Balden
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d