These quotes are from a 1993 piece. There's a lot to object to, and I wonder how the author feels about electoral politics now. Nonetheless, I think some of these quotes have bearing upon some of our recent discussion.



My vision of a new American socialism will certainly not be the same as that of others on the Left. My objective here is not to present a theoretical blueprint, but to build a framework for dialogue among democratic socialists across organizational and ideological boundaries. All too frequently, the disorganized, fractious Left has made its sectarianism a red badge of courage, refusing to speak to others who share 90 per cent of its own politics because they differ on the remaining 10 per cent. But we can no longer afford to dwell in the political ghettoes of ideological purity.


The immediate task for American socialists is to support and build strong workers' movements and to defend the rights of trade unions. But we must also help create transitional economic structures that address working-class needs and build solidarity across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and income, giving people a concrete understanding of what economic alternatives are needed.


Harrington never really understood that the natural political behavior of liberals is cautious, timid oscillation: When strong social-protest movements are in the streets, liberals will drift to the left; with the rise of Reaganism in the 1980s, they scurried to the right. As Stanley Aronowitz observed in The Progressive in 1986, "The Democrats are not an alternative to the Republican conservatives. At best, they slow down the most retrograde aspects of the GOP program; at worst, they bestow legitimacy on conservative goals, leaving their constituents bothered and bewildered."



I didn't become a socialist because I was seduced by the persuasive materialist logic of Karl Marx. Nor did I equate the "freedom" of liberal socialists like Irving Howe with the gritty struggles for "freedom" which were the political objective of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Socialism is only meaningful to African-Americans and other oppressed people of color when it explains how capitalism perpetuates our unequal conditions and when it gives us some tools to empower ourselves against an unfair, unjust system.

That's not a metaphysical enterprise but a practical, concrete analysis of actual, daily conditions. A social theory is useful only to the degree that it helps to explain reality, to the degree that it actually empowers those who employ it. And the day-to-day reality lived by millions of African-Americans, Latinos, and others along the jagged race/class fault line beneath American democracy is the continuing upheaval of social inequality and racial prejudice. Socialists must find a way to speak directly to that reality holistically, not as an after-thought or an appendage to their chief political concerns.


No American socialist organization has ever been able to attract substantial numbers of African-Americans and other people of color unless, from the very beginning, they were well represented inside the leadership and planning of that body. When that does not occur, individual radical intellectuals such as West might be affiliated with a socialist group, but that affinity remains marginal and secondary to their primary political endeavors. When forced to make a hard choice of priorities between the "socialist project" and "black liberation," the vast majority of black activists throughout the Twentieth Century have chosen the latter.


In a different way, white social democrats generally shared this contempt for the ideals and human aspirations of working people, focusing instead on the utilitarian mechanics of winning elections and running governments. A century ago, Edward Bernstein, the very first "socialist revisionist," proclaimed, "To me that which is generally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... i_13417479 (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_n2_v57/ai_13417479)

The quick story is this: GQ commissioned Joshua Green, a serious political reporter on the staff of the Atlantic, to do a piece on infighting within Hillary Clinton's campaign. I guess they wanted Politico-type insider street cred. Instead, they threw away whatever cred they had. And ended up in a scandal first reported by Politico.

Green was a good choice: He knew the turf, having written a much-admired cover story on Hillary for the Atlantic last winter. But in the course of reporting, Green had dinner with a Hillary mouthpiece. Next thing we know, one of Bill Clinton's aides is in the GQ editor's office telling him there'd be a "problem" with granting access to Bill Clinton for GQ's "Man of the Year" issue if GQ ran a muckraking Hillary story.

Of course, any editor with a backbone would say, "Thank you, your crude effort to kill this story will be included in the story. Goodbye."

Instead, the GQ editor killed the story. Profile in courage!

What is even more reprehensible is that GQ's editor then began to claim—in a cringe-inducing, unconvincing way—that the visit by a Clinton consigliere had nothing to do with his killing the piece. Instead, unforgivably, he turned on his own reporter and in a spectacularly demeaning way suddenly claimed there were "problems" with the story unrelated to Clintonian pressure.

Here's what reporter Joshua Green told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post: "GQ told me it was a great story and a hell of a reporting job, but they didn't want to jeopardize their Clinton-in-Africa piece. GQ told me the Clintons were unhappy and threatened to revoke access to Bill Clinton if the Hillary story ran."

And here's what GQ editor Jim Nelson said: "[T]he story didn't end up fully satisfying. ... I guarantee and promise you, if I'd have had a great Hillary piece, I would have run it." He added that there was no connection between the two Clinton stories.

Who do you think is telling the truth here, and who is shamefully prevaricating? I know who I believe.

I'd like to emphasize that my disgust with this comes not from any anti-Clinton bias. I've actually endorsed Hillary Clinton (months ago, in another publication). While this incident might cause me to reconsider, I think the Clintons have the right to exercise as much control as they can. That's politics. But editors have the obligation to resist them. That's journalism. Or used to be. It's more the magazine editor's spinelessness than the Clintons' attempt at control that makes the skin crawl.

For one thing, it won't be just an isolated incident. It will send a signal to politicians that magazine editors are whores for access who can be rolled at will. And then there's the intangible cost: the cost of such behavior to whatever respect is left for the magazine industry from a public that increasingly thinks the mainstream media are in the pocket of the powerful.

It's time for magazine editors to fight this censorship-by-access. Because it's really self-censorship: the false belief that one can't run a probing story just because one is denied the anodyne "exclusive" quotes and the super-special "exclusive" photo of the powerful subject reclining on his or her patio.

And I believe there is at least one rarely used, rusty weapon at magazine editors' command: the unjustly disdained "write-around."

The write-around: It's a term of art in the mag trade, mostly used derisively, and it refers to a story done about a person without that person's cooperation, and thus, in contemporary terms, without the usual perks one gets in exchange for the fawning profile...

No, I'm talking about stories that involve serious subjects, profiles of people with public and private power. There is a general—and erroneous—sense that with such a subject, a write-around is a cop-out; a kind of head-fake by a reporter who doesn't have sufficient talent or clout to land the crucial interview. But I'd argue that a write-around can be more revealing and truthful than a piece written with the cooperation of the subject.

For one thing, it's hard to underestimate how media-savvy people in power have become, how unlikely it is, even if you do get access, that you'll get anything that's not pre-scripted and self-serving. You rarely see an unguarded moment, and seldom is heard an unrehearsed word.

For another, there's this thing that used to be called "investigative reporting." A practice that the cult of access has undermined and marginalized, at least among the glossy magazines. It's journalism that trades the in-home tour for a rigorous scrutiny of the balance sheet and the SEC filings...

Access itself is not all it's cracked up to be. There's the journalistic equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. I know, I've suffered from it. I find it hard to be as cutting, or even as critical, as I really feel about people who allow me to enter their zone of privacy. I blame my parents for teaching me manners—the best investigative journalists don't have the best manners. The best investigative reporters might be called "sociopaths for truth." I think you know the type I'm talking about. And the very best of these are often good at faking empathy and then coldly eviscerating the empathized-with one.

Some writers are built this way, happy to sacrifice the person for the story. But not enough anymore! Janet Malcolm famously wrote (in the opening of The Journalist and the Murderer) about the way writers gain the trust of their subjects and end up "betraying them without remorse." It may have been true when she published the book, in 1990, but is it now? It sounds cold, but not enough reporters and writers are willing to betray or even alienate their subjects. If they do, they risk being denied access to other subjects. They're no longer part of the club...

And I suggest that there might be different rules for subjects who are and aren't media-savvy and/or powerful. You almost want to protect the media-naive from themselves because it almost feels like stealing when they say something damning that you know will make a great pull quote.
But with the media-savvy and the powerful, one can't be paralyzed by worry about hurt feelings. They rarely are.
http://www.slate.com/id/2175248/pagenum/all/

I didn't really wanna top post this, and tho it's kinda obtuse here I still think it kinda fits.


"The Democrats are not an alternative to the Republican conservatives. At best, they slow down the most retrograde aspects of the GOP program; at worst, they bestow legitimacy on conservative goals, leaving their constituents bothered and bewildered."

I think we have seen the last of "at best"...