You display a very limited understanding of “consensus building” Caitlin. You conveniently avoid addressing my comment that it was the Arizona voters whoenabled McCain’s ascendancy to the Senate, without which he’d probably be a lobbyist for the war machine and unable to effect policy. That was the point of my comment.
You responded with a tangential cut and paste from your counterpunch response about how you never proposed building consensus with the alt-center… judging that “they’re too far gone” and that neoconservatism is the very ideology you’re advocating collaborating against.
Unlike you, the vast majority of voters who work, raise families and have any number to issues to consume their valuable time could not define the words “neoconservative, libertarians, paleocon or anarchists.” They simply base their selection on their Democrat or Republican party preference.
Some may call them ignorant. I think they’re just busy getting on with life.
You place far too much importance on “labels.”
I’m willing to wager that if you took the time to query the aforementioned group, which is probably a good percentage of the voter base, you’d find this to be true. They vote along party lines because of the media bias they embrace. Labels are just words that get in the way.
So now you’re going to eliminate all of the democrats who voted for Clinton… who is clearly to the right of many neocons.
You’ve just eliminated the majority of your base!
Clinton followers are not neocons. They don’t have the information on Clinton that reveals her neocon soul. Much of what they’ve run across, if they’ve done rudimentary searches over the internet, reveal the pizza gate scam and other fake news planted by Republicans. So they dismiss all of it and revert to their party line positions. To most die hard Clinton supporters any negative news about Clinton is just fake news.
A former career State Department official who I befriended last year once told me that all of the negative news you read over the internet about Clinton is a lie! And this was a fellow with a PhD!
I could only smile, in utter amazement, and ask: “Really?”
You cited Nader’s book: “Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State” in your response to the recent hit pieces on counterpunch. I have to ask: are you so clairvoyant that you can state with certainty “the neocons, the white nationalists also known as the alt-right, and your typical Fox News baby boomer won’t have a lot to offer in terms of collaboration?”
Are you not aware that Conservative Grover Norquist has endorsed Nader’s book and concept, saying, “Right and left coalitions are areas of principle agreement, on perhaps procedure or even goals. Not a compromise where somebody walks in and gives up part of their soul in order to get something that moves — they think — slightly in the wrong direction, in the hope of doing something else?”
FYI, from Wikipedia: Norquist was listed as one of the five primary leaders of the post-Goldwater conservative movement by Nina Easton in her 2000 book, Gang of Five.[37] Working with eventual Speaker Newt Gingrich, Norquist was one of the co-authors of the 1994 Contract with America, and helped to rally grassroots efforts, which Norquist later chronicled in his book Rock the House.[12] Norquist also served as a campaign staff member on the 1988, 1992 and 1996 Republican Platform Committees.
According to a 2011 memoir by former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Norquist was one of Abramoff’s first major Republican party contacts.[43] Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform were also mentioned in Senate testimony relating to the Jack Abramoff Indian lobbying scandal which resulted in a 2006 guilty plea by Abramoff to three criminal felony counts of defrauding of American Indian tribes and corrupting public officials.
Norquist was instrumental in securing early support for the presidential campaign of then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, acting as his unofficial liaison to the conservative movement.[12] He campaigned for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.[38] After Bush’s first election, Norquist was a key figure involved in crafting Bush’s tax cuts.
Norquist traveled to several war zones to help support anti-Soviet guerrilla armies in the second half of the 1980s.[citation needed] He worked with a support network for Oliver North’s efforts with the Nicaraguan Contras and other insurgencies, in addition to promoting U.S. support for groups including Mozambique’s RENAMO and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola.
To my way of thinking… it doesn’t get much more “deplorable” than Grover Norquist.
The point being: if Nader’s ideas built consensus with Grover Norquist, what does that say about your tactic about avoiding consensus building with those who voted for the neocon Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote against Trump by over 3 million votes? Are all of Clintons supporters neocons because they voted for her?
The point of consensus building is to unite the masses on common needs, irrespective of their political “labels” that you are so won’t to assign, so the sheer weight of that consensus crushes the few who prop up a system that serves only the wealthy. After all… the man behind the curtain of power is just a little man with a loud voice and a lot of money.
Did you actually read Nader’s book?
Your screeds against McCain have just illuminated and embraced the very “tribalism” you attribute to those who refuse consensus. From your response to counterpunch: “I would like to humbly suggest that maybe, just maybe, some of the revulsion on the left toward the idea of collaborating with the anti-establishment right against the ruling elites who have functionally decimated American democracy has less to do with morality and more to do with tribalism.”
One definition of tribalism is: “loyalty to a tribe or other social group especially when combined with strong negative feelings for people.”
“Especially when combined with strong negative feelings for people.” That describes your position to a “T.”
