Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Choice And the "Plague On Both Their Houses" Left

From ongoing conversations in the Moot, an interlocutor claims: "Row v Wade is not materially in danger" due to Republican gains.

But, of course, in the last few months, Roe v Wade has been radically undermined de facto if not de jure through the implementation of a host of material barriers and harassments in State after State captured or radicalized by Movement Republicanism. These GOP governors and legislatures were empowered by low Dem voter turnout for the Mid-Terms, especially by youth voters many of whom I believe were thinking too much like my "plague on both their houses" detractors are now. Further, the skew of the Supreme Court toward a Movement Republican partisanization via the malign activism of the Federalist Society leaves Roe in the balance, incomparably more precarious at the Federal level than is suggested here. Empty Republican promises about jobs that never made any sense in their formulations but the senselessness of which never mattered to spoiled Americans who just wanted to "throw the bums out" provided a magic carpet ride into power whereupon these corporate-sponsored radicals and mouthpieces immediately started shifting billions more from everyday people to billionaires, attacked abortion, and launched into union-busting (insert "I told you so" here, if you like, and re-read this blog's hair on fire posts in the lead-up to the Mid-Terms from the archive). Once again too many good smart righteous people to Obama's left underestimate the irrationality and organized authoritarianism of Republicans in their disgust with Democratic compromises and inadequacies: Most of that disgust is morally and ethically well justified, of course, but not necessarily politically so, which, as I stress again and again and again, is a different mode of reasonable belief-ascription, with different standards of warrant, than either morals or ethics or aesthetics or commerce or science.

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