It’s a warm Monday night in Madison and around town police are responding to complaints about loud groups of juveniles and belligerent customers who refuse to leave. These are routine tasks and normal social issues in small cities and I imagine similar scenarios are occurring in towns like Wausau or Oshkosh or Eau Claire. Madison is a bit different from normal towns which may explain why Madison is being run by COWS, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. The COW view of the relationship between government and society is evident in the writings of Matt Vidal and the following reading list can help people who want to think like a Madison Liberal.
More Money In Your Pocket revives the old Marxist theory that concentrating power in multiple competing private organizations is more dangerous for the common man than concentrating power into a single large government, because private is bad and public is good.
George W. Bonaparte: The Renunciation of Leadership outlines a sincere belief that the Republican Party is intent on transitioning the American Democracy into a Military Dictatorship.“Ever since formally democratic governments have replaced monarchies, one of the main rhetorical tricks … has been to continually invoke the image of the free individual versus the authoritarian state. Freedom and state power, they say, grow in inverse proportion. … Meanwhile, as critics from Marx to Chomsky have pointed out, private power grows and concentrates in fewer hands. Global mega-corporations, which own or set the terms of business for most smaller corporations and businesses, increasingly control more aspects of life.”
“In 1848, Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Philippe, was elected to the French presidency. A few years later he staged a coup against his own government, setting up a military dictatorship. In two analytical pamphlets written soon after these world-historical events, Karl Marx wrote of the conditions that "made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part." Although under much different conditions, we are again witnessing a person of grotesque mediocrity mascarading as a hero. With Bush's relentless drive for war, we have the dubious distinction of living in a similar world-historical conjuncture.”
Bush's Legacy: Dead Bodies, Dead Wrong, Dead Logic argues that it is the Republicans who have removed logic and reason from America’s political debate.
“In the wake of Bush's political tsunami, logic must be counted among the dead. Rational argument, along with accountability, has become as quaint as the Geneva Conventions. … Indeed, it may be Bush's crowning achievement that reason has ceased to be an effective component of political discourse in the US. Rather, appeals to emotion (fortified by lies, half-truths and image management) have become the primary form of persuasion in American politics.”
