Recapturing Kansas - Interview with Thomas Frank

[housewolf]

Interview published in "In These Times"

Recapturing Kansas
By Emily Udell

<snip>

Do you think the traditional values of the left have as much appeal as the cultural values of the right? And is there a motivation besides just winning for Democrats to adopt a real values stance? As you wrote in your book, where is the soft money in that?

<snip>

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1866/

[imenja]

1. Democrats hold the left in contempt

I found this passage very interesting. It helps explain what perplexes many of us about the DC Democrats and the DNC:

" But something has become apparent to me since I moved to Washington, D.C. . There is this aversion, bordering on hatred, for the left, especially among Democrats. People who dominate discussions in Democratic circles despise the left, and there is no way in hell they are going to embrace the values of the left. You can try to explain to them how they need to do it for strategic purposes or in order to win elections, it doesn’t matter. The Democratic centrists got their way , they got their candidate, they got their way on everything, and they still lost. And who gets the blame? It’s going to be the left."

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1866/

[housewolf]

3. "Democrats hold the left in contempt"

It does help to explain it, doesn't it? Makes you really wonder why the DLC is in the Democratic Party!

[imenja]

4. maybe we can take over anyway

If our strategy really is a wining one, if Dean or someone similarly minded becomes chair of the DNC, maybe we really can change the party and send these anti-leftists back to their east side co-ops.

[papau]

2. Excellent - I hope the DNC folks read this.

:-)

[xchrom]

5. kick

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. This interview confirms what I have long believed about some of the

members of DU's own DLC Defense Squad. They need to get their butts out of Washington and New York and see what's going on--what's really going on--in the rest of the country.

I see hopeful signs of a bottom-up, slow motion coup on the part of more progressive Dems, and I hope that these activists can accomplish something before the country sinks irreversibly into fascism. (And I speak as one who hated the loose use of the term "fascism" in the 1960s.)