Reply #2: It would be nice to know [View All]

[Lexingtonian]

which specific 'leftist values' you are most interested in discussing, because the counterarguments are far from uniform.

This is a country whose state/government was founded as a means of putting natural resource wealth and agrarian labor proceeds into the hands of landowning white men of European-ish acculturations such as Calvinistic Christianities. Institutions of the society were the Church, the King, slavery, a landowning class, racial segregation, legal discrimination against women and non-whites and 'immoral' people, the predatory Corporation (e.g. the Virginia Land Company), and a few others. The privileged class- landowning white men- competed with each other for rule via elections that placed them into executive positions and on councils of several kinds.

Greater economic justice has always been interlinked with- alternated with- increases in social justice in this society. Arguably almost every major increase in social justice was preceded by an increase in GNP- selfsufficiency meant that the King became dispensible, the beginnings of the Industrial Age meant slavery became dispensible, the hugh productivities gained during the 1920s and into WW2 meant that segregation's economic rationale vanished, and so on.

The essential nature of the U.S. economy until WW2 or so was that expansion had to do with exploitation of new technologies and thereby newly available natural resources- land, timber, water, ores, coal, oil, metal, nuclear power. Labor was ignored as a method of attaining wealth- it was only the means of tapping stuff for the having and taking. Thus labor was degraded as a human activity- the product had dignity, the process and its operators were ignored. So it is in all colonial economic systems. (That's why the corporation version of it is called 'neocolonialism'.)

Secondly, a hugh number of people in this country are very well aware that economically they are just tiny cogs in a system that values the exploiter over the man with dignity and foresight. The only means of attaining dignity is in redefining the project- and so they fall back on the one myth in the mainstream culture that is disconnected from economic status and confers virtue, that of The Christian Country.

You would think that the Christianity pursued in this country would be of a Left-leaning variety, but it isn't. Because a large number of its adherents want it to be the dominating ideology they've neutered its critique of social and economic injustice- so that it doesn't conflict with the secular powers. And as the country de-Europeanizes culturally the Dominionists find that the organized Christianity they control is in decline, and they have turned Right in their politics. They've made an alliance with the conservative economic power holders to limit social and economic change as well as justice to preserve their power.

So: the Churches and the Corporations are in an alliance against the forward-looking Individual American and her/his desire to live life according to fairly Modern (post-theist, post-chauvinist) intellectual standards and Post-Industrial Age material standards.

Our trouble is that the dividing line between the supporters of these two groups goes right through the Baby Boomers, splitting them pretty much in half (well, depending on what standard of purity you apply) for now.

The Right's problem is that they're running out of voters of the pre-War generation and are only gaining a little bit among Boomers. The Christian Right is weakening more rapidly than the Mammon Right, though, so we're going to see the pretense of equality between the two end in just a couple of years.

I'm quite sure that Nader doesn't really understand this interplay between economic and social justice gains in American history. He has no serious historical sense of this country, only an ideological substitute, and that's why people don't trust his judgment.