Deep Thought

19 Comments

1. 

   SFHawkguy on March 26, 2009 at 8:11 pm

   Of course that goes both ways.  If Obama spent half the time listening to real liberals as he did conservatives things would be a lot different.

   America supports liberal ideas right now.  Liberal ideas will save America–as they have in the past.  It’s time for Obama to start giving liberal ideas the time of day.

2. 

   keres on March 26, 2009 at 8:33 pm

   “South Park” Explains The Bailouts.

3. 

   Guthman on March 26, 2009 at 9:20 pm

   Noticing it? I am under the distinct impression that I am living it. Am I dreaming?

4. 

   Superpole on March 26, 2009 at 9:21 pm

   smokin’ something tonight?

   this makes no sense.

   Summers is on record during the Clinton administration as supporting deregulation. that makes him a scammer.

   now he’s on the inside again, allegedly working for us?

   inside or outside, he’s still a Wall St. guy. now that deregulation can be seen as nothing but one huge Ponzi scheme, Summers has about as much credibility as those X-Ray specs I used to see advertised on the back page of comic books.

   good thing senator Sanders is blocking the recent attempt to get yet another wall st. insider on the team.

   • 

     Guthman on March 26, 2009 at 9:24 pm

     As far as I remember, last November friendly, moderate Mr. Obama got elected, not Maximilian Robbespiere…

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       BooMan on March 26, 2009 at 9:52 pm

       And who were the Jacobins, anyway?

       Were they men of the people?

       At the outset the Jacobin Club was not distinguished by unconventional political views. The somewhat high subscription confined its membership to well-off men, and to the last it was–so far as the central society in Paris was concerned–composed almost entirely of professional men, such as Robespierre, or well-to-do bourgeois, like the brewer Santerre. From the first, however, other elements were present. Besides the teenage son of the Duc d’Orléans, Louis Philippe, a future king of France, liberal aristocrats of the type of the duc d’Aiguillon, the prince de Broglie, or the vicomte de Noailles, and the bourgeoise who formed the mass of the members, the club contained such figures as “Père” Michel Gerard, a peasant proprietor from Tuel-en-Montgermont, in Brittany, whose rough common sense was admired as the oracle of popular wisdom, and whose countryman’s waistcoat and plaited hair were later on to become the model for the Jacobin fashion. The club ostensibly supported the monarchy up until the very eve of the republic; it took no part in the petition of the 17th of July 1791 for the king’s dethronement, nor had it any officialshare even in the insurrections of June 10th and August 10th of 1792.[2]

       The club was radicalized by the departure of its conservative members to form their own Feuillants Club in July of 1791. This club saw far less success than the Jacobins, surviving barely a year before its members were arrested and tried for treason.

       [edit] The Terror

       After the fall of the monarchy Robespierre became a central figure in the Jacobin Club, and his faction in the National Convention, assembled in the fall of 1792, became known as Jacobins. They were at first a minority, also called “the Mountain” (Montagnards), because they sat together in the higher seats in the Convention’s hall; they were dubious about the war with Austria which had begun that spring, but supported more revolutionary measures at home.

       The Jacobins assumed more and more power during the spring of 1793, with the support of the Parisian mob, which overawed the Convention, culminating in a coup at the end of May. They were to hold power until the summer of 1794, and they repeatedly purged the Convention of those they held disloyal to the Republic, ending with a widespread program of execution, the Reign of Terror in their last months. Robespierre, generally the spokesman for the successful faction, had great esteem for his reputation as the “the sea-green incorruptible”, and set up the slogan of the Republic of Virtue, until the Jacobins’ last purge, 9 Thermidor, in July 1794, executed Robespierre himself.

       Thermidor was an alliance between those who felt Robespierre had gone too far and those who felt he had not gone far enough. The latter were the bulk of the surviving Jacobins; they were unable to maintain their control of the Convention, and were eased out of power, and the Jacobin Club itself dissolved, during the fall of 1794.

       The Jacobins’ overwhelming power rested on a very slender material basis. Some compared the club’s autocracy to that of the Inquisition, with its system of espionage and denunciations which no one was too illustrious or too humble to escape. The power of the Jacobins was frequently felt through their influence with the Parisian underclass — the sans-culottes — who the Jacobins could reliably count on to support them, and to mass ominously in the streets and at the National Convention when a display of force was considered desirable. Yet it was reckoned by competent observers that, at the height of the Terror, the Jacobins themselves could not command a force of more than 3000 men in Paris. A primary reason for their influence, or strength, was that, in the midst of the general disorganization in revolutionary Paris and in the provinces, they alone were organised. The police agent Dutard, in a report to the minister Garat (30 April 1793), describing an episode in the Palais Egalité (Royal), adds: “Why did a dozen Jacobins strike terror into two or three hundred aristocrats? It is that the former have a rallying-point and that the latter have none”.

       Kind of like a bunch of Ivy-League slackers leading a mob of the proletariat to put the axe to their former dormmates that went into finance.

       • 

         Guthman on March 26, 2009 at 10:58 pm

         Co-starring Arianna Huffington as La Vengeance

     • 

       corvus on March 26, 2009 at 9:54 pm

       Scroll back forty years, and aside from his racial egalitarianism, “friendly, moderate” Mr. Obama is a center-right politician. Closer to the center than Mr. Clinton, who was not that much different than Mr. Nixon in his politics.

       The pendulum can’t swing back in a single day or a single presidential term, but you can’t blame people for hoping it would swing a little faster than it is now.

       Mind you, I voted for Mr. Obama and I have liked what he has done in some areas a great deal more than I expected. I do not, however, see him attempting to make much progress against America’s two biggest problems: its materialism and its militarism. I remain hopeful that he will move against them sooner or later, but it may be that it will take future leaders to accomplish that, and the best we can expect now is for our current leaders to arrest the decay.

       • 

         wilderness wench on March 26, 2009 at 10:05 pm

         Far as I can tell, corvus, there is no US without the precise nature of its materialism & militarism. Our leadership can no more change these basic aspects of our national culture than the human body can change its relationship to water.

         • 

           corvus on March 28, 2009 at 1:01 am

           I would argue that there have been stretches of time in American history in which materialism and militarism have waned considerably, especially the militarism. The Founders were quite adamant about not getting involved in foreign wars. Outgoing President Buchanan was content to let the South secede peacefully and the Civil War was quite unpopular in the North in its first few years. We had to be dragged pretty much kicking and screaming into both world wars.

           It was only when we emerged in 1945 along with the Soviet Union as the last remaining self-sustaining powers worth mentioning that we became bent on world domination. Which is another example of the danger of coming to resemble one’s enemies, but I digress; the point is that militarism is not as intrinsic a part of the American psyche as the historical aberration of the Cold War might lead one to believe.

           Materialism has been a much more deeply rooted part of American culture than militarism, not least because we owe our existence as a nation to the ease with which we got all this free land by stealing it from the survivors of the smallpox plagues that Hernando de Soto unleased during the early period of European exploration in the New World. We had, however, effectively run out of frontier by the late 19th century, and there was a considerable wave of communal and post-capitalism utopian movements around the same time whose aftershocks continued into the 20th century.

           One of the reactions to the rise of American communist and socialist groups in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a series of laws that effectively made real opposition to capitalism and consumerist materialism illegal. The rise of the USSR as our nemesis in the postwar era further cemented the suppression of political and economic alternatives.

           The Cold War is over. The great powers are at peace. Any inherent militarism in American culture has faded to the point that it took an extraordinary fraud of unprecedented scale for the dead-enders of American militarism to drag us into Iraq, easily our least popular war ever. If real opposition to the established order is legalized again, I think we’ll see that militarist, materialism “Americanism” has a great deal many more American opponents than anyone could have dreamed.

         • 

           wilderness wench on March 28, 2009 at 12:33 pm

           I thank you for your thoughtful reply, corvus. It’s true that my sense of our national character is formulated mainly by our most recent history.

           Distaste for the militarist means of expanding empire into the Middle East notwithstanding, the current flavor of US foreign policy (let alone the disproportionate piece of the common wealth perpetually dedicated to the military) indicates to me that we remain, at heart, wedded to a characteristic militarism — even if that relationshp is most clearly reflected, now, in our mythology.

       • 

         Superpole on March 27, 2009 at 10:20 am

         great take, corvo.. I concur.

         look, the larger context here is the voters and the future of the democratic party as a viable, credible political party OF labor, the poor and middle class– as indeed it was when I grew up and was until the “new” democrats (clinton, emanuel, mccaullife, etc.) made their entrance.

         Ultimately, there are two reasons the dems won last November; Obama as the dem candidate, and a very crappy economy. people always vote their pocketbooks.

       • 

         Superpole on March 27, 2009 at 10:28 am

         finishing my thought here..

         the dems are on very shaky ground.

         Obama won crucial state Ohio by just over 200,000 votes; hardly a huge margin. 20 electoral votes there.

         if Obama and the majority dems in congress do NOT deliver on EFCA and single payer health care, and do it soon, I contend those 200,000+ voters will stay home in November 2012.

         it’s not, as the fantasy-landers over on the orange site seem to think, that disgruntled voters are going to run over to the repug side. there’s a third option; an option that Millions of eligible voters take on election day: STAY HOME. of course, few want to address what that is all about.

         right now, EFCA looks dead in the water; there’s one strike.

         the dems have to deliver something to their base; that something is EFCA, single payer health care, and millions of new jobs.

         • 

           corvus on March 28, 2009 at 1:06 am

           I certainly hope EFCA can be saved, if for no other reason than a rejuvenated labor movement would bring about the permanent end of American conservatism. Single payer health care may or may not be enough, but it would be almost as good.

           I assume that the millions of new jobs will have to be delivered no matter what by any party that wants to remain in power for long. FDR’s employment programs didn’t just ease the public’s suffering; they defused what could very easily have turned into widespread, armed civil unrest.

     • 

       rootless2 on March 27, 2009 at 8:42 am

       and the same people who opposed Obama during the primaries by telling us, breathlessly, that he was not the messiah and was, in fact, nothing other than a pragmatic moderate, are now loudly explaining that we’ve been betrayed and thrown under the bus by Obama who is governing as a pragmatic moderate instead of a Revolutionary Messiah who will Smash the Corporate State and Lead Us To the Utopia. If you were a cynical person, you’d think their primary political goal was a numbing despair and futile weak anger, not any actual change.

   • 

     rootless2 on March 27, 2009 at 8:37 am

     You get a medal from Politico because you paid attention to what they told you to pay attention to.

     You have not noticed what Peter Orszag is doing at OMB.
     God forbid you notice what Hilda Solis is doing at Labor – she’s just a girl and labor unions are so very boring, no?
     The most powerful attempt at health care reform since FDR died is moving through congress, but who cares?
     The largest wilderness bill in 30 years is going to the WH so sign, but environmental stuff is so out.

     All that matters is wall street and everything depends on the celebrity characters that we are fed by the MSM.  

5. 

   map106 on March 27, 2009 at 12:28 am

   Ah, I think this is one of Booman’s devil’s advocacy remarks. He’s just trying to make his fellow comrades the analytical, clear-thinking adults that he wants us to be.

6. 

   anarchronarchist on March 27, 2009 at 11:07 am

   Love this Diary on Uggs in the recent posts list:

   http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2009/3/27/11038/4769

   It’s so sincere and full of progressive ideals!

   • 

     anarchronarchist on March 27, 2009 at 11:54 am

     If folks want to advertise here, they should pay!