"Courtiers" is just a little hard to buy because there's no objective incentive for all the fawning they do over Republicans. I mean, there's no chance any given courtier will fall out of W's favor and suddenly be locked in the Tower for future execution. So how comes it that the national press lines up so uniformly?

It's possible you have one set of authoritarians (the press) that identifies with another set of authoritarians (Republicans). Their interests may not exactly coincide since consciousness-lowering and exxxtreme governance don't really go hand-in-hand, but I guess whatever trade-offs are required can be worked out on the fly.

Posted at April 18, 2008 7:53 PM in response to About last night

Shorter Jane Harman: Let me tell you a story about how I'm both incompetent and powerless.

Whatever.

Posted at March 31, 2008 8:13 PM in response to Jane Harman Comments on The Release of Bush's Law by Eric Lichtblau

I can't make sense of this "scandal" for the life of me. Why would Obama, before he's even the nominee, open discussion with Canada? Is he looking for Canadian votes? The whole pretext seems utterly shammy. If someone could explain to me why they think Obama is supposed to have begun talking with Canadian representives, that would be amazing.

Posted at March 4, 2008 5:00 PM in response to Are You Experienced?

What is it about the word "feminism" that reduces even sensible people into anti-intellectual misogynists? Get a grip, people.

Posted at February 21, 2007 1:29 AM in response to Reporting feminism: Are we our own worst enemy?

Hardt and Negri's Empire is excellent on this topic. And, it's a book Max Sawicky would have to respect!

Posted at February 1, 2007 10:19 AM in response to Empire vs. Democracy: Who's in Favor of Democracy?

Who's talking about nostalgia for street protests? Hell, I'm nostalgiac for the Weather Underground. And I'm only 26!

Seriously, I am rather nostalgiac for Seattle '99. And it's hard to say bodies were directly in harm's way in that situation.

Posted at January 25, 2007 10:20 PM in response to Can we get over the 60s already?

I understand why this is a concern. But I don't think there's much to worry about. From what I've heard, the organizers of the January 27 protest are interested in finding right-leaning and centrist allies and changing minds, and not in brute confrontation. (Not that there are many minds to change.)

Not to mention, after the tasering at UCLA a last month, it's a lot harder to portray cops sympathetically with You Tube.

Posted at January 20, 2007 12:11 AM in response to An Afterthought on the Aftersixties

Frankly, it has been my hope that the netroots would be capable of de-institutionalization; of making already existing institutions more pliable and fluid. It might be the stated goal of Kos to reform the Democratic party into an entity that differs more decisively from the Republican party, but that also seems at odds with the strategy of "gate-crashing." I mean, what's the point of gate crashing if all you're going to do afterward is hand over the same political power held by people you don't like to people you think you might like more? If you're going to crash the gate, you might as well tear down the wall. As it stands, the flow of power in our democracy is totally bound up in the representative; my hope for the netroots is that it can disseminate the power of the representative to the represented. That means the netroots is an "organization" or "institution" whose own power is radically (rhizomatically) dispersed as a function of its medium. Maybe netroots is a misnomer--how about the rhizonet?

Posted at January 16, 2007 12:56 PM in response to Institutions Talk, Enthusiasm Walks

If it is true that all generalizations about the 1960s left are false, it also seems that all Max's generalizations about the netroots are false.

This seems like an indiscriminate attack with that the "Netroots" unfortunately happened to be in the way of. On one hand, Max seems to be calling out the New Left for focusing on identity politics at the expense of class politics. If so, fine, let's talk about that. On the other hand, he seems to be calling out bloggers for not making economics-based critiques of contemporary society--while inappropriately using the Netroots as a stand-in for the New Left. Now, there are some ways in which bloggers strike me as inheritors to SDS gripes, specifically media critique (60s leftists saw media serving bourgeois class interests; netroots bloggers see them as serving conservative political interests, which in turn serve economic interests). So just because Digby doesn't mindlessly quote slogans from the Communist Manifesto or Eros and Civilization or anything from that totally incoherent list from Trotsky to Fanon doesn't mean he's uninformed. And Atrios, we might as well note, has a PhD in economics.

Interestingly, Judith Butler, an academic representative of the New Left, has recently allied herself with folks on "the internet" -- so Kos is getting props from the intellectuals, even if he isn't wrangling with Lukacs (Lukacs?) on a daily basis.

It further needs to be said that most of the netroots people have plainly disavowed affiliations with the 60s left. I mean, I agree that the well trafficked blogs aren't radicals, but they never pretended they were, and, as has been noted above, within the spectrum of current mainstream political discourse, they're as far left as is imaginable!

Which leaves your final complaint: "The big decisions on governance are made elsewhere." Indeed: in the five years that there has been a liberal netroots, the big decisions on governance have been made by the Republicans who had actual power. I don't see how you can fault liberals on the internet for not wielding influence when liberals on capitol hill were equally ineffectual.

Posted at January 15, 2007 11:29 PM in response to MY LEFT FANNY