[GPSCC-chat] Scott McLarty on the need for "New Language"

[alexcathy at aol.com]

Dear Green Friends, 

Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States, haswritten an important essay posted on Common Dreams about the need for newlanguage in political discourse in the U.S.  Here McLartyargues that in 2011 the time has come"to replace the Republic/conservative/right vs. Democrat/liberal/left paradigm"in order to"bust open the narrow political debate offered daily in the mainstream media."

As many of you know, I've said for years that it's high timeprincipled progressives (or for that matter, principled conservatives,if there are any), to abandon the tired clichés of "liberal"Democrats and "conservative" Republicans (including "New Left" clichés from the1960s) for rational discussion about the challenges of the 2010s.

That is why I have reposted Scott's essay in it's entirety on the CaliforniaGreening Blog for comments by California activists.

Posted on California Greening (reposted from Common Dreams), Thursday, May 19, 2011
Which Side Are You On? New Language for a New Political Reality
by Scott McLarty

"Everybody pulled his weight, Didn't need no welfare state... Those were the days!"

Those are some of the lyrics from the theme song to the popular 1970sTV sitcom 'All in the Family', considered controversial in its day,about a working-class bigot named Archie Bunker, who sang it at the topof the show with his wife Edith. Archie's nostalgia for pre-1960s Americainformed much of the show, which satirized small-minded conservativism,paranoid patriotism, contempt for youth culture, and racism.

One of the ironies of Archie Bunker's worldview is that the 1930s, 40s,and 50s weren't nearly as conservative as he remembered them.The same faulty nostalgia drives the so-called conservatives of today'sRepublican Party and the Tea Party movement, who imagine those decadesas a time when hard-working Americans pulled themselves up by theirown bootstraps.

It's true that Americans worked hard during these years.But the bootstraps stuff is nonsense.The 30s through 50s were the time of the New Deal,low-cost loans from the Federal Housing Administration,the GI Bill, huge subsidies for defense contractors during the Cold Warand other industries that employed millions of people,massive transfer of funding from cities to the burgeoning suburbs,federal projects like interstate highway construction and the space program,generous investment in public schools, record union membership,high tax rates for corporations and the wealthy,good job benefits, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,which ensured financial stability in old age and medical crises.

These things softened the trauma of the Great Depression and gave us thegreatest period of prosperity in US history.Middle-aged Tea Partiers and Republicans, born in the 1940s through the 1970s,reaped the benefits of the kind of progressive 'big government' and'socialist' ideas they now condemn. By their own standards,Tea Partiers are practically red diaper babies.

. . .

Think of government as a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric,Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Monsanto, Wall Street,the insurance and pharmaceutical cartels, and other top industries.(China, which now provides cheap labor for corporations,has shown us that both communism and capitalism can be subsumedinto the state capitalist system.)

Progressivism has nearly collapsed as a political force,even though progressives still exist and sometimes get elected.We can begin digging ourselves out of this hole by adopting a new model toreplace the Republic/conservative/right vs. Democrat/liberal/left paradigm.We can declare our independence from the bipartisan consensus.We can reject the "active propaganda machinery controlled by the world'slargest corporations [that] constantly reassures us that consumerismis the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excessis the cause of our distress, and economic globalization is both a historicalinevitability and a boon to the human species"

(David C. Korten, 'When Corporations Rule the World')

Doing so will bust open the narrow political debate offereddaily in the mainstream media.

...

Please Read the Full Text and Leave a Comment at my Blog:

California Greening:
http://cagreening.blogspot.com/2011/05/scott-mclarty-new-language-for-new.html

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