The Changing Game

quoth Submariner;

By not attacking HRC on her many and obvious personal misdeeds, Obama is already changing the game. These guys, Hannity, Dobbs, Scarborough, and others realize that they are in the process of becoming extinct.[...]

Obama's vision is not MLK's but his tactics are. These white political gangster rappers will persist but they will become minor figures speaking to a marginal and extremist audience. This is why I hope a President Obama would continue his boycott of Fox. As the promoter of this bestiality, to appear on Fox gives white political gangster rappers and their audience legitimacy. Obscured in the current campaign is the considerable courage Obama has shown by not appearing on Fox.

As much as I would enjoy agreeing with your analysis Sub, and I am currently inclined to think that you may be correct as regards Baraka's having outflanked the dominant memetic morphology du jour, methinkst you perhaps underestimate the open-ended and generative metamorphic nature of the beast(s) in question. We are, after all, talking about "conservatism" as identity politics.

Here’s my thesis: Conservatism is a form (indeed the original form) of identity politics. It is expressed through multiple forms of political ideology based on justifying elite rule and the division of the human race into dualized classes (ideal and counter-ideal) in terms of some “natural” moral order.

Conservatism appears in various forms as the rationalizations and dualized classes shift over time, and in three distinct states of realization, reflecting different levels of development of the self. The overt rationalizations commonly mistaken for conservative ideology are, in fact, derivative phenomena—tertiary at best. The primary phenomena is the creation of a conservative identity, the subject of conservative political narratives. The secondary phenomena is the supporting ideology of superior and inferior groups, casting conservative identity as something to be preserved, promoted, and defended against the forces of evil, embodied in its demonized others. The primary and secondary phenomena are relatively constant over time, while the tertiary phenomena vary considerably.

Baraka may indeed have managed to evade tertiary formations in the current, prevailing, collective convervative phenotype. This remains to be seen in the Pennsylvania and Indiana primaries. Let the record show, however, that over the past 7 years, several attempts have been made to reapportion the tertiary characteristics of the conservative narrative in America.

1. GWOT (global war on terrorism)

2. Islamo-fascism

3. Illegal immigration and the Culture War

As I've said previously, progressive/populist movements from William Jennings Bryan to John Edwards have always sought to include outright racists in their coalitions. An Obama victory finally extirpates them from political consideration. For if you tell me, like Howard Dean did during his run in 2000 and Edwards did this year, that I have to get down with a straight up cracker, I say fuck that. I don't give a damn about their economic struggles. Sailors on the slave ship endured high mortality and terror inflicted on them by the captain but they never saw the slaves as human and rebellious slaves took no pity on them.

While tempermentally, I'd be strongly inclined to agree with this assertion, morally and tactically, I am compelled to disagree. First and foremost - I believe that it is imperative that we take into consideration the economic struggles of the poor, white, and pissed - as much as we take into consideration and engage around the economic struggles of the Black underclass - as I wrote at VisionCircle;

Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.

Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America.

If the poor in America remain divided, the impending economic collapse will subject all Americans to a political reality and danger unseen since the economic collapse of post-WWI Germany and the rise of National Socialism. The emergence of a genuinely and overtly fascist formation in America would not require significant investment or effort. In fact, it has been a vividly imagined ethnonationalist fantasy now for the past 30 years. While the wizards of minimal regret population scenarios and forecasting had other mechanisms in mind than did the physicist William Pierce - the history of the rise of the Third Reich stands as phenomenally instructive as regards the actual ways in which an advanced democratic society, when buffeted by severe economic privation, can be transformed into a genocidal fascist dictatorship via the rules of the democratic system itself.