If The Left Were Doing It Right It Would Hold Power And Make Laws

Assuming you are right that Duncan Black was referring to what I posted yesterday when he wrote his snarky one-sentence post you call to my notice.   And who knows because he finds it less work to write a one of those snarky koan-like sentences instead of the two-sentence "pieces" he had reduced his writing to?

What would Duncan Black know about how the left could do it right?   He apparently doesn't even understand what the left doing it right would look like and he mistakes decades of impotence for wisdom.  Like so many on "the left",  he wants the left to keep insisting on what he knows as comprising the agenda of "the left" during his life time and rejects any suggestion that its coming on fifty years of failure is a sign that, indeed, the left has been doing it wrong.

He's not old enough to have a memory of a national left that had a real influence in politics.  Just as a reference, Nixon was reelected and appointed William Rehnquist to the court the year Duncan Black was born.   He was eight when Reagan was elected.  

For his entire life the progress made by the left has been being overturned by a series of successively more right wing governments and courts - including the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama - meanwhile the left has been doing what it obviously doesn't need to do to win elections and make laws.  

I know that his affluent audience members are somewhat perturbed that THEIR left hasn't taken power and fiddled with a few economic tools to tweak the economy and fund infrastructure projects, but they, by and large and with a few exceptions, aren't the ones who really pay the price for the serial failures of the real left to gain power and change laws in a really liberal way.

The affluent "left", especially in the media, has been in the forefront of selling an agenda that was largely the cause of the problem.  It was one thing for the faction of his left who love to tell people in the white underclass how stupid they are, alienating them, but the really suicidal "leftist" positions were those that enabled the media to lie on behalf of oligarchy.   IT IS THE MEDIA THAT HAS DUPED THAT WHITE UNDERCLASS FOR THE OLIGARCHS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF RULES AND LAWS WHICH THAT "LEFT" HAS CHAMPIONED ON BEHALF OF ITSELF.   The media are the ones who presented the class snobs as comprising "the left".   Meanwhile, the "left" that likes to preen in its superiority has mistaken their "left" for one that is interested in the agenda of the left that held office, before Black was born, the ones who made the progress that has been under attack ever since he was born.  After all these decades, it's clear they aren't willing to make changes to the left necessary to regain the trust of those who could be convinced that the real left is on their side.

I would imagine that somewhere, when he still wrote, Duncan Black has referred to the old Freudian chestnut about a psychotic being someone who keeps doing the same thing and expecting different results,  well, that is what his "left" has been doing for his entire life.   It doesn't work.  Not that its failure is most noticed by Duncan Black's audience, perhaps with some exception, or his friends gained by his former career as a writer.

If the left were doing it right, it would hold power and be making laws and regularly making legal decisions.   Any political faction that has had fifty years of failure to succeed, is, beyond any rational assertion, doing it wrong.   And there is nothing more wrong than pretending that isn't the case.