Marxists for Keynes is back from its brief hiatus. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with the news cycle this week (in particular trying to sort out John Kerry’s further implosion… the Jay Leno show was a jump the shark moment if ever I saw one). So I’ll just take a moment to finally weigh in on the Dean confederate flag flap.
First, beyond Dean’s foot-in-mouth disease, I’m wondering why he thinks it’s an interesting topic for the campaign stump anyhow. To paraphrase Lieberman, “Howard, I think I know what you were trying to say, but couldn’t you have just done it instead of talking about it?” David Brooks-style cultural overgeneralizations seem to be all the rage these days: we have office park Democrats, NASCAR Democrats, now stars-and-bars-on-the-pickup-truck Democrats. I know that someone needs to be strategizing about which voters to court and how, but do we need candidates to be talking about that instead of actually courting those voters?
John Edwards’ Southerner-than-thou schtick is desperate and tired. When will the national press that Edwards’ demeanor and accent is not that of Southern everyman (Clark seems to fit that bill), but of the same slice of the Southern upper-middle-class as Gore?
Paul Krugman’s take on the whole affair was his most disappointing article to date. The right is using race to divide and conquer? Well, often yes, but the South’s support for the Republican party and a conservative agenda runs far deeper than the murky racial politics of key GOP-ers. If anything, religion is a more pervasive source of its support. For a man who hasn’t a kind word to say about Marx, Krugman seems to skip any useful, nuanced post-Marxist notion of ideology and goes straight to vulgar Marxist opium-of-the-masses political science.
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