"It's a lonely life out here on the fringe."

Ah, facebook, I love you!

My current fb profile pic shows me wearing my Che Guevara t-shirt, which nobody ever says anything about at all.  Until today.  An old friend of mine from high school who went on to do really well, got into Harvard Law School with Obama back in the day, took issue, as a liberal, with the shirt via private messaging.  We went back and forth a bit, with me joking around because I was getting ready for work and didn't want to get too involved.  I told him it was mostly for annoying people and that I don't really support violent communist revolutionaries.

But his response to that got me serious: he told me it's easier to tear things down than to provide solutions.  So I gave him an earful:

But for the moment, my take is that there are already lots of reasonable solutions out there, but most of them are dead on arrival when it comes to implementation in that the political apparatus is so dominated by wealthy interests. So single payer health care becomes this corporate chewing gum and baling wire monstrosity called the ACA, and on and on. Unless by solutions you mean cracking the political code.

It was weird, actually, with a conservative friend commenting on a Richard Wolff lecture I posted the other day--Wolff is a Marxist economist. My friend rejected a lot of it and then turned around and suggested a sort of hybrid system. I think most Americans would be pretty keen on Northern European style social democracy if they understood what it was about, and this conservative friend serves as a nice example of that.

Another thought. I've personally given up to some extent trying to persuade anybody of anything. Democrats don't listen because they're all about winning, and they continue to creep ever rightward thinking it's the only way to win--ah, the shit I've taken for voting for Nader! Republicans don't listen because they're in a completely different universe. So I've taken to attempting to get people to think, to reconsider what they understand to be normal or the way things ought to be. I mean, this is the situation today: conservatives have effectively won as far as the cultural narrative about economics and government is concerned. Indeed, the Democrats are in fact conservative now when you exclude the so-called social issues--signature policy programs like ACA or cap-and-trade were originally hatched in conservative think tanks. So how do you fight an omnipresent narrative? I don't know. But like I said, my strategy is to try to put some chinks in that narrative, to try to get it to not make so much sense. I mean, because lots of it doesn't make sense.

This brings me back to Che. While, of course, I'm not a communist, the very notion that someone would brandish such a Cold War icon in this day and age makes no sense. So what's going on? My assumption is that some folks would just think I'm stupid, but that's fine. It's a visible symbol that at least one person disagrees with all this "end of history" claptrap. It's a symbol that something's not quite adding up. It makes people pause, if only for a moment, in order to ask "what's up with this?" Just as you have done.

Of course, like I said, most people don't care one way or the other. But that's what the left has left at this point, attempting to jar people's thought process in a sort of Brechtian way. Because there's not really anything else to do. Labor is a joke. The Democrats effectively purged any association it once had with the far left and is now bereft of its own ideas, a handicap the right does not suffer.

It's a lonely life out here on the fringe.

I haven't heard back from him yet, but I'm hoping he takes up the challenge.  He's a good guy, but I don't think he had any idea where I'm coming from politically, and came off as sort of lecturing me.  But now I've opened it up somewhat, laying out some foundational ideas for my own ideology and political strategy, and I'm very curious to see his take on some real argumentation from a point of view with which I imagine he is unfamiliar.  I mean, Real Art readers are familiar because I go on and on about this shit, but if he's anything like my older brother, also a lawyer, he's probably been too busy over the years to really dig deeply into left-wing political philosophy, or any other philosophy for that matter.

This might be fun if I don't inadvertently piss him off.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$