A Glass Nearly Empty
by Bill Bianchi, SolidarityEconomy.net
Imagine a Republican strategist, a little unnerved by signs of a Progressive revival across the US during the past few years, asking himself, ‘what can I do to discourage those fledgling leftist”? Well, sir, you couldn’t do much better than have them all read Robert Brenner’s speculative piece, Structure Vs. Conjuncture: the 2006 Election and the Rightward Shift. It relentlessly crushes any flowers of optimism that might have bloomed from last November’s Democratic electoral victories.
Brenner starts by framing the results as purely anti-Bush with no chance that they could also signal a surge of progressive movement within the Democrat party and in the country. No support is offered for this pronouncement, other than to say that it is “generally acknowledged”. Despite the Democratic victory in both houses of Congress, Brenner characterizes the Republicans loss a “remarkable” feat in which they “held their own” because their base, roughly one third of the electorate, turned out in (more…)
