Well three cheers for getting along but its getting way too far along for young activists to still like the president.  Most of the sharp left youth around here (IC, IA) are way over that.  I'll have a  fairly exhaustive account of the early Obama administration and transition out one of  these days (very easy and quick to do; I do  just have to pull the latest and ongoing and endless outrages out of the files and plug them in...it s like shooting fish in a barrel) and its going to be pretty unpleasant. Obama fans (young and old) will blame the messenger but the terrible facts will be beyond serious question for those who can begin to see the latest prez in the "world of power as it really is" instead of that world "as they wish it to be" (to quote John Pilger).  I had a freshman student once who had really bad BO.  I took it to be my adult responsbility to tell him this and to suggest remedies related to personal cleanliness. It was an unpleasant conversation but he ended up being grateful (and more popular).  In a similar vein, I take it to be my adult responsibility to tell young activists with a bad case of B(arack)O(bama) lust that they're not smelling too good these days, morally and intellectually speaking. The Election is over and its time for a Change (of clothes among other things).   They can find some good moral and intellectual cleansing agents at places like Black Agenda Report, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, and here. where a whole bunch of us have been reporting the real story for years (since the Keynote Address in my case)..... 

Oh my God, the sickening "play well with others" lecture from Mr. know it all.  Uggh.."Bad" radicals and "nice" liberals: this is a relationship I know all too well.  I've spent an adult lifetime trying to negotiate it and I've been amazingly polite and accommodating for 95 percent of it all, believe me. I'm actuallty quite good at it.. Not perhaps with libera/radical CD, for whom (and from whom) there is ony minor respect (though I actually like him [an actual organizer] more than the really narcisstistic  and opportunistic PFO types like Dyson and Wise) but with others, including many to his right...I'm generally quite good actually.  I should be given a peace prize for how nice and polite I've been to middle class (let's drop "coordinator" for now) liberals. I know them very well; I come from them and their circles.  I'm a product of nice liberal college neighborhgoods (Hyde Park)  and towns (Ann Arbor) and all of that., after al. (Shoot, I even get along with Republicans, actually).

One thing I've noticed is that the onus is always on the radicals to be nice and proper, to heal the relationship and make it okay. Never on the liberals. And after a while it just becomes absurd and dysfunctional.  The  real message (and the reality) is "we have all the power and you have none, or very ltitle so you must be the polite and decent ones. You must stop drawing impolite attention to our accomodations and weakness and conservatism and stealth allegiance to dominant doctrines and ideologies." 

And 95 percent of the time, I'm very nice, a very nice and polite guy. Not in intellectual work, I suppose, though. There I just insist on teling the full and unvarnished truth about what's happening and that makes some liberals and progressives fear you and think you are mean and so on. It marks  you for very nasty things in academia and the media; it costs you jobs and interviews and book contracts and friendships and more. And its always your own fault --- you made these fractures and shoudl stop beeing so "stubborn" and "hard" by insisting on things like telling the whole cold truth on, say, the StatuQuObamessiah phenomeon and presidency. 

 Fixing that can't just be the radicals' job. My advice -- no my request --- to many squishy liberal-progressive types is please try to study some history and look at how much progressive reforms have required radicals --- abolitionists, socialists, paciificts, communists etc, --- and the threat of radical change from the bottom up (thunder on the left) so to speak --- for passage.  Think about how to demonize and fear radicals less and learn from them more.  This often bad relationship isn't just our fault. Liberal progressives may lost without radicals, without real live anticapitlaists and anti-authoritarians and anti-imperialists to help make elites understand that the costs of not changing are greater than the costs of changing.

Chris - shoot I want as many kids a possible to get health insurance so good to expand Schip.  Yeah, that's regressive alright - the tax thing you mention. Notice  that StatusQuObama (a phrase that has been picking up I just saw it the other day on a Black Agenda Report commenter's post) has used the recession to rescind his former Edwardsian promise to repeal Boy King George's tax cuts on folks "earning" (right) more than $250,000...the campaign point there was that that would pay for expansion of health coverage.  Krugman did a piece a while back about how a real health coverage plan needed to be up-front , not later, thanks to the perverse fact that most folks get their health insurance on the job  (hey, can we get car and home insuance via the labor market too) in the U.S., meaning in turrn that job loss is also the loss of health coverage  for millios in the U.S. (how's that as a device for employer rule:if you piss off your boss, you get the plug pulled on your family's medical care). On  the other hand, I'm not sure I wouldn't just rather have Obamessiah go back to the drawing board and come back with something like single payer --- except, wait, he won't.  He thinks American "culture" can't handle single payer health insurance just like he thinks that "culture" just couldn't the nationalization of the banks.  Well, I guess me and almost everybody I know and millions of U.S. citizens arent real Americans cuz we could definitely handle that and a Helluva lot more. 

Minot: - exactly, though I just can't read coordinator Carl anymore - I play well with others actually but no not with Davidson and his ilk. There is no excuse for "progressive Democrats'" ancient and ongoing gaping moral hole on U..S.-imperial slaughter (think LBJ) ...and that applies to many of the Edwards folks I met in the Iowa campaign

Jeff, the message that the poor deserve their fate is ubiquitious in corporate television culture, as you may I tried to suggest in a  recent ZNet essay ("The Resistance Gap"). Looks like better watch "Cribs." 

On hope and Obama, this just in from a friend who is a susbtitute teacher in an inner-city public school system (I thought it was very interesting):

"Today, I asked a class for which I was subbing (high-school English students, about a dozen, all-black, at one of the systems's actually nice high-school facilities) what they thought of Obama.  Their initial reaction was one of, for lack of a better way to say it, pride and joy."

"But upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a rather shallow sentiment.  For when I asked them if they expected any real changes under Obama, they all said no."

"So while they are (currently) happy he is in the White House, they know full well that he will be no different from any other president -- and it's not something they only know 'deep down.'  They know it pretty close to the surface."

Thanks John.  If I can combine writers' self-indulgence with movement-oriented utility then I will be a lucky person indeed. Tyler I am one who was drawn in by Chomsky to no small degree.  I was Left but only in an armchair and academic (and only in a rather old-fashioned Marxist way, with little sense of respect or understanding regarding  left-anarch and libertarian-socialist thought beyond some interesting writings by Orwell and a marvelous essay by Stephen Marglin titled "What do Bosses Do?") before reading NC in the early-middle 1990s.  He does seem to have an activating impact including but stretching beyond intellectual liberation. He's one of history's great demystifiers. One place where good left reporting and analysis  (and here of course Noam is unparalleled...his piece on "Elections 2008 and Obama's 'Vision'" in the February Z Magazine is just loaded with indispensable information, as always) is important is of course in overcoming the information embargo and doctrinal frameworks  imposed by corporate-state media.  The thought control  and propaganda that have congealed quite powerfully around the Obama phenomenon for some time now has elicited a lot of activist interest in good left research on the new president.

Paul

Your journalistic talents are second to none. Every article you write is well researched, referenced and well set out. Please keep on writing as you are an educator to an awful lot of us. As Tyler rightly comments, you bring people in to the cause by your superb writing.

Z-Net would be a much poorer place without your regular pieces. I cannot believe that you would achieve so much if you concentrated solely on movement building. I think that you are movement building already in the work that you do.

Best wishes

John Andrews

Hey Paul,

This is a really interesting post.  

I often find that your articles are well geared towards non-activists and people not already on the left.  I know a couple of people who read your Obama critiques regularly leading up to the election, and they were drawn in to ZNet because of these articles.  That is a positive move, especially if they take the next step and start to look at visioning and movement building.  Of course that is just a personal anecdote, certainly not an argument for you continuing that type of work.  

Also, as you know, countless people (including myself) have been drawn to the left by Noam Chomsky, who mainly writes and gives talks.  

I do appreciate your willingness to analyze your own work to make sure it's the most effective strategy.  I also think more emphasis on the left needs to be placed on organizing and building the "institutional basis for meaningful realization" of our ideas and vision.  I don't know that this work has to be so anonymous.  For example, organizers and potential organizers on ZNet might benefit from hearing about the organizing experiences and strategy of some of the more high profile thinkers in the movement.