Response to 'There's Only One Position and It's Filled'

http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2012/11/theres-only-one-position-and-its-filled.html

http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2012/11/theres-only-one-position-and-its-filled.html?showComment=1354230496810#c6081806411711463217

Best way to think of Harper is - he’s Canada Dubya.


To right-wingers in America, George W. Bush represented the intersection of the movement’s three major areas – the foreign policy chickenhawks, the Evangelical Christians, and the corporate oligarchy (aka the establishment). That Bush through his personal life, or via his families’ political connections was able to unite all three of these under the banner of the Republican Party was Karl Rove’s third greatest political success (number 1 and 2 being getting Dubya installed into the White House via fixing numbers in the US Supreme Court, and Diebold). In many ways, Dubya represented the ultimate version of Nixon, Reagan and his father all put together. Combine that with controlling Congress and the Supreme Court and it’s clear to see - that was great for the right-wing. It was a complete disaster for everyone else on the planet. The untold damage these actions have caused throughout the world – we might never recover from.

The reason why the Republicans have not had someone in office as President since 2009 is largely because the establishment has come to the conclusion that the rest of us already came to in 2001, having someone like that in authority is disastrous for their existence.

Harper is the next generation version of Mulroney in that he’s been able to unite several factions across the right - the old factions of the Reform Party (which I think have many common intersections of beliefs not too dissimilar to the manufactured Tea Party movement in America), the Canadian corporate establishment, and just enough people still disenchanted with the Liberal Party via the Sponsorship Scandal to hold onto office. One key difference between Mulroney and Harper was that the former neutralized the Pequistes by integrating them into the party and making a lot of broken promises, while the latter simply have them scatter into irrelevant parties like the BQ, and now the NDP such that their influence is negligible.

What you’re seeing with the NDP and Liberals today, is exactly what happened to the Democratic Party during Dubya’s years in office – that is believed that because of his win, they needed to pander to the right-wing viewpoint/interests and subsequently abandon any left-leaning or progressive view. What ends up happening is – the establishment decides that it’s better to have real right-winger in office than a pretend one under the belief that the former will be more successful. This is where I think Canada is now.

In time, the Democrats learned that being a right-winger was fucking up the country, and rather than pander to that, it’d be better to pander to everyone else.

Since 2009, the biggest problem in America has been that because the corporate establishment has so much control over so many aspects of society, real progress beyond that is more or less held back.

What’s really needed both here and in Canada is a way for someone or a movement to really get people’s attention beyond a means the establishment can control. I’ve said it before – the only way any real progress is going to be made towards addressing society’s problems (be it local through global) is a movement that operates and reaches people to act beyond the establishment’s outlets of control. How to create such a movement that gets people to act but itself be neither co-opted by the establishment, nor corrupted to become something twisted and evil, is the question I ponder.